By Megan Finnerty
Asst. Campus Editor

The second speaker at the 8 p.m. session of the 19th annual Holocaust Remembrance Conference in the Class of 1950 Lecture Hall, Yaffa Eliach, a professor of history and literature at Brooklyn College, spoke about the emotional journey she experienced when doing research for her most recent book.

"Once There Was A World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok" is an in-depth history of Eliach's town and community before the Occupation.

With a lilting accent and measured tone, she detailed how she was part of former President Jimmy Carter's fact-finding mission in Europe as the government made plans to create the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

She went back home and was reunited with the nanny who had saved her from the Nazis by pretending Eliach was her daughter. She was taken to the hospital where her mother and baby brother had been taken after they were shot by the Nazis. She went back to the house where she hid under a table while her mother was shot, fell and died on top of her.

But her speech did not focus on the pain and fear of the past. She has already faced those ghosts and didn't use her speech as a forum for exorcising them.

Instead, she focused on looking at the Holocaust as a celebration of the lives and the peace that existed in Europe — more specifically, Poland, before the Occupation.

After visiting concentration camps, killing fields, survivors and towns and cities where the killing was the worst, Eliach decided that the best way to commemorate those killed in the Holocaust was not to focus on how they died but to focus on the humanity they had when they died.

"I wanted people to see that the Jews were real people with lives when they were murdered," she said.

To do this, she created the "Tower of Life" exhibit at the museum. It is a collection of more than 1,500 photos of murdered Jews taken from family albums and private collections.

On her journey, Eliach went from house to house — all over the world — gathering photos, court documents, diaries, town records, letters and almost anything else people had saved from their old Polish shtetl.

She also spoke about the central idea of the conference itself, learning from the Holocaust in order to prevent another one from destroying more lives.

"We must document and record it properly to ensure that it never happens again," she said. "We are a country of immigrants, and we must teach appreciation and understanding of other ethnic groups. We must understand others; that is the lesson we should learn from the Holocaust."

Eliach has devoted her life to teaching, and she has devoted much of her teaching to the Holocaust — ensuring that it can be used as a warning, a cautionary tale, to the world.

"I believe we can change the world — if not now, then in the future," she said. "That is why I came. I am a great believer that you must meet as many people as possible and make personal contact. Then people will remember and learn."