Editorial: Holocaust survivor Eva Lassman’s anti-hate message was her personal story

“When we are able to instill in people a desire to respect and be tolerant of all humanity, we may eventually have peace. If not, we will continue to experience the inhumanity of war and terrorism, and the deaths of children and other innocent victims of violence.”

Holocaust survivor Eva Lassman

Those words, from a letter to the editor of The Spokesman-Review on May 28, 2004, eloquently describe the dedication and spirit of the diminutive hero who wrote them.

It seems noteworthy that Eva Lassman’s death last week at 91 came at a time when some voices are demanding a firmer community response to the bigotry believed to be behind the bombing attempt on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Indeed, at least three decades of Lassman’s life were largely a response to Nazi atrocities. She labored to make sure this and future generations never underestimate the consequences of hate. She made hundreds of presentations, mostly to children, and her powerful message made the Holocaust chillingly real for thousands.

Even in the final weeks of her life she was still heeding the challenge she heard fellow survivor Elie Wiesel make in 1983, that if those who lived through the Holocaust don’t tell their stories, others who died in the Nazi extermination camps would die a second time.

How arduous it must have been, reliving the oppression, the suffering, the degrading sting of anti-Semitism. Lassman once said her own children were in their teens before she was able to tell them why they had no living grandparents, aunts or uncles.

But she assumed the burden selflessly, and the Inland Northwest, tainted as it has been by Hitler worshippers, is a better, more ethical region as a result of her efforts.

The Spokane area is fortunate for the Eva Lassmans, the Jim Chases, the Tony Stewarts, the Bill Wassmuths who stir our sense of decency and summon us to the defense of hatred’s innocent targets. Lassman not only repeated her personal account of the Holocaust, of the injustice and inhumanity inflicted on Jews, she applied that lesson on behalf of the homeless, gays, racial minorities and anyone whose difference turned them into scapegoats.

Lassman’s passing is a sorrowful loss, but her legacy will be endless.