June 26


TEXAS:

Docent offers glimpses of her heart
Her personal Holocaust 'lessons' adds to visitors' experience during her
museum tours


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BECOMING A DOCENT

Holocaust Museum Houston is seeking about 40 additional volunteers to lead
tours.

What's involved: Volunteers are needed for weekday and weekend shifts.
Weekday docents are on duty for one four-hour period the tour itself
takes 2 1/2 hours weekly; weekend docents are on duty for a shift every
other weekend. Volunteers are asked to commit their service for a year.

Training: 24 hours of classroom instruction. Next sessions are Aug. 23 to
Sept. 29, practice tours are Oct. 3-14, and new docents begin Oct. 15.
Continuing education periodically is offered. Volunteers may enter the
program with any level of knowledge about the Holocaust.

Applying: Applications accepted through Aug. 15. For information, call
the museum at 713-942-8000.

Other volunteer positions: The museum also needs volunteers for the front
desk, working on exhibits, data entry, bookstore inventory and office
duties.


*****


Hazel Bensky was only 8 when her classmates in the English town of Bishops
Stortford tied her to the schoolyard lamppost by her pigtails and stoned
her.

When her 12-year-old sister, Rita, arrived hours later, freed her from the
post and demanded to know why no one had stopped the attack, Bensky's
teacher responded: "She's a Jew, and she has to learn how to defend
herself."

Such are Bensky's World War II memories, and they roll through her mind as
she shepherds visitors through the Holocaust Museum Houston.

On paper, Bensky's job as volunteer docent is to interpret facts and
figures, explain the factors that led to Hitler's evil rise and underscore
the humanity of the estimated 10 million Jews and Gentiles who died in the
monstrous extermination campaigns.


Her mission in life
Bensky, now in her early 70s, offers more. She calls them "lessons," but
they are really glimpses of her heart.

"I think I've taken the museum as my mission in life," she said recently
as she helped promote the Hermann Park-area museum's drive to recruit tour
leaders. "It is the knowledge that if every student who leaves here walks
out of the museum with just one of the important lessons of the Holocaust
then I've done my job."

Bensky, who has worked at the museum since it opened in 1996, is among 110
who guide up to 80,000 annual visitors through the exhibits.

"It brings purpose to your life,"she explained. "Every day that you do the
tours, it adds credence to your life."

Volunteers, said Suzanne Sutherland, the museum's director of visitor and
volunteer services, are key to the museum's mission.

"We focus on the present," Sutherland said. "We want to make sure that
something like this never happens again. That makes the experience a
positive. When a docent gives a tour and sees a 'light' go on, when kids
and adults start to see what happened and how, how each must take
individual responsibility for the choices they make, they feel uplifted."

Sutherland said the museum needs about 40 more docents to work four-hour
shifts, especially on weekdays. A thorough knowledge of Holocaust history
isn't as necessary for the position, Sutherland said, as an aptitude for
public speaking and an ability to relate to a wide range of the public.


Thinking on her feet
Bensky became involved in volunteer activities after her family returned
to Houston from Albany, N.Y., where she had been an executive with
temporary personnel agencies, in 1993. When the museum solicited docents
in 1996, Bensky wasted no time in applying.

"I asked what a docent was," she said, "and they told me it was a tour
guide. I asked if they thought I could do it, and they said, 'Why not give
it a shot?' "

Her first tour, a group of high school students, set the pattern for her
trademark quick thinking.

"I thought I was very smart," she said. "I had taken all the information
and put it on index cards. We got through the first portion Hitler and
Mein Kampf and I dropped all the cards. The only way I could get going
again was to tell them that we'd just go through the exhibits and read the
posted information together. That's how I got through my first tour."

Bensky's personnel recollections of the war often add a deeper dimension
to her tours. She tells of her family's repeated evacuations from London
the schoolyard episode occurred during one of those periods and the fear
that gripped her family during the attacks.

When the family was in London during the attacks, Bensky, her parents and
two older sisters would seek shelter in the basement of their home. Only
in 1944, when Bensky was 11, did she fully appreciate the war's horror.

"One night in 1944, the Germans brought everything they had to bear in our
part of the city. There was (an anti-aircraft gun) mounted on a truck in
front of our house. It started at 6 o'clock, and the bombing was
continuous. You could hear that ack-ack firing through the night. That was
the first time I really was scared."

A few years ago, Bensky took her granddaughter, then 12, to London's
Imperial War Museum.

"While we were viewing the exhibit dealing with the Blitz, there was an
air-raid warning, and everyone rushed to a (simulated) air-raid shelter,"
she said.

"We sat on long benches, and you could hear the bombs exploding and people
screaming. I was holding my granddaughter's hand, and she looked up and
asked why I was crying. I recognized then that children don't understand
the meaning of death."

The people Bensky leads through the Houston museum run the gamut from
those who are well-versed in Holocaust history to those who know virtually
nothing.


Skinhead visitors
Once, her visitors group included a pair of swastika-tattooed skinheads.
Throughout the tour, they said nary a word. When the tour reached its end,
Bensky inquired why the men had come.

"They told me they just wanted to see what kind of lies we Jews were
telling," Bensky recalled. "I told them that the German government was
paying reparations to Holocaust survivors and that certainly that wouldn't
be happening if this weren't all true. Then they told me to go to well,
it wasn't heaven and left.

"Those are the type of people I would most like see to come so that we can
try to make them understand. I can't see how anyone can come through the
museum and leave without a minuscule portion of the brain being awakened,
without a little question, a little seed of thought."

Such encounters are extreme and rare, but just dealing with the intensity
of the Holocaust on a week-to-week basis can be draining.

"It is emotionally draining," Bensky said. "But I never wanted to take it
home with me. I'd go to the water wall (fountain near Williams Tower) for
about an hour, and then I'd go home.

"I don't ever want to say I'm steeled to it. I'm not. But when I get a
question from a student that makes me realize I've hit a 'homer,' that
reinforces me.

"Then I know I just have to do more."

(source: Houston Chronicle)