Students meet one of NM's last holocaust survivors

Bosque School students came face to face with living history Monday — namely one of New Mexico’s last remaining Holocaust survivors — who came to teach them about the different sides of humanity.

Around 40 juniors gathered in a visual and performing arts hall to listen to the story of Andy Holten, a docent for the New Mexico Holocaust Museum who between 1943 and 1944 lost the vast majority of his family to the genocide that claimed the lives of 6 million Jews.

“I’m incredibly glad to have had this opportunity, since we will be one of the last generations to be able to speak to actual Holocaust survivors,” said junior Tenzin Wong. “I think that’s incredibly powerful.”

Bosque School is a private college preparatory school for middle and high school students situated along Albuquerque’s Bosque. Attendees for Monday’s presentation were mostly students enrolled in humanities classes, which teacher Norah Doss said combine English and history.

Holten, 84, blended textbook history about the beginning of the Holocaust with stories of his experience as a “hidden child,” after his birth parents made the excruciating, but ultimately life-saving decision to ask a Christian family to take him in.

“They made the very difficult decision, I’m still in awe that they made that decision,” Holten told a captivated audience. “But that’s what made it possible for me to be here, talking about it.”

Holten, then a Jewish 5-year-old, went “underground” with Johannes and Petronella Meijer in the town of Haarlem, not far from where he was born in Holland, where he hid out under a false name for the last two years of World War II.

In January 1944, his parents and maternal grandparents were loaded onto a train with nearly 1,000 others — 122 of whom were children — bound for the Auschwitz concentration camp.

His mother and grandparents were immediately sent to the gas chamber, while his father was forced to work in a nearby camp for around four months before he fell ill due to work conditions and was executed in August.

Holten survived the war, completing high school under the wing of the Meijers, who he emotionally said “elected to keep” him, before immigrating to the United States in 1956, where he earned a physics degree from the City College of New York.

He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, reaching the rank of captain and helping design protection for the fuel system of the attack aircraft A-10 “Warthog” Thunderbolt II, before moving to Albuquerque and eventually becoming a substitute teacher in Rio Rancho for around 22 years.

Holten, who is among 23 to 33 Holocaust survivors in the state, has recounted his and his family’s stories to hundreds of local students in the last few weeks alone, according to New Mexico Holocaust Museum Director of Programs Carson Morris.

That experience, Holten said, can at times be difficult. For the most part, however, it’s been therapeutic.

“Talking about it has helped me,” he told the Albuquerque Journal, while clutching a copy of Nicole Krauss’ “The History of Love” — a novel one student described as involving a Holocaust survivor turned U.S. immigrant grappling with their past and people from it.

But telling his story also serves much larger purposes, Holten said, referencing a 2020 Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany study finding that 63% of millennials and Gen Z respondents didn’t know of the murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.

Above all, Holten said his story is one that teaches young students to practice tolerance, and about the many different sides of humanity.

“I experienced the worst of what people can do to one another — they exterminated my whole family,” Holten said. “But I also experienced the best of what people can do. The Meijers took me in ... they were willing to take a chance.”

Holten’s message seemed to have had an effect on his students.

“It’s so important that we understand our history,” said junior Soren Olsen. “Even in the future, we really need to learn about the Holocaust, and prolong this understanding of our society ... and I think it was really enlightening to speak to someone who actually had to experience that.”