Sacred Ground App: Triumphing over Holocaust, Hate

BALTIMORE -- Sisters Rena and Danka Kornreich survived almost all of World War II together in the Nazi death camps. In fact, Rena was on the first trainload of women sent to Auschwitz, fooled into thinking it was just a short-term work-camp.

Rena and Danka's story is told in the book, Rena's Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, written by Rena and co-author Heather Dune Macadam.

Macadam told CBN News Rena and her fellow passengers on that first trainload of women quickly found Auschwitz was indeed a deadly place.

"Two-hundred-ninety-seven teenagers are on the first transport," Macadam said. "Fifty are dead in the first six months."

A Tale of Survival

Danka joined Rena in Auschwitz a few weeks after Rena's arrival. Rena's Promise documents how the sisters kept each other alive and helped many others during their years in captivity. 

A key part of their survival was refusing to dwell on the reality of the daily gassings and killings going on all around them.

"She does see the SS pour the Zyklon B into the gas chamber, and she's on a work detail where she can see that," Macadam said of Rena. "She never goes on that work detail again. She realizes to see that is for her spirit to die."

Rena rose above it all after the war by putting Hitler and the Nazis behind her. She wholeheartedly embraced life and gave it — like to her only daughter Sylvia.

"Apparently when I was born, my mother was just elated," Sylvia Lanier told CBN News at her home in Columbia, Maryland, near Baltimore. "And we've heard stories that she felt that this is the revenge on Hitler."

'Where Is Your God Now?'

The Nazis did at one point steal Rena's faith, as she watched them march hundreds of little orphans into the gas chambers. 

Macadam described what Rena saw that day in 1943: "About 500 children and they're holding teddy bears. And she prays."

As she begged God to stop the horror, a Nazi guard got right into her face.

"SS Hassa came up to her, spit in her face, and asked, 'Where is your God now?' And that's the moment when Rena lost her faith in God," Macadam said.

Rena and Danka also witnessed the Nazis kill off beautiful Jewish women, including the sisters' friend Adela Grose.

"They selected 2,000 healthy, young, beautiful women," Macadam said. "Adela was a red-head, gorgeous young woman and Rena watched her go to the gas."

It took decades but Rena regained her faith as she saw thousands inspired by her book.

"How the story is helping them to believe in survival, to believe in love, to believe in the strength of the human spirit," Lanier said of the book.

Macadam recalled what Rena would tell audiences: "She said, 'There's only so much room in my heart, so I don't hate. I love. To hate is to let Hitler win.'"

Rena and Danka ended up in America and remained close for some 50 years before Rena passed away in 2006. Danka died six years later.  

Rena's Promise first came out in 1995, but a revised edition with many new anecdotes about their fellow prisoners is being released this month.

"When you hear 6 million Jews and 10 million people total, that's such a phenomenal figure that it's really hard to put that into the reality of what happened there," Lanier said of the Holocaust. 

"And by having all the individuals that we can now tell stories about it, including my mother and my aunt, that makes it real," she said.

App Keeps History Alive

These stories and those of other survivors keep this tragic part of history alive in the hope that it will never be repeated. New generations can better learn about the Holocaust through a new app produced by four friends in New York City and Baltimore. It's called Sacred Ground: a Holocaust Enlightenment Ritual. Soundtrack Recording Studios owner John Kiehl said the app transports users to Berlin's Holocaust Memorial.

"There are these little stones that you start walking through and they get bigger and bigger and bigger until you're walking through these tunnels," Kiehl said. "And the message being is that this is how this kind of evil overtakes us: it grows until we're trapped."

The app is filled with photo after photo of Europe's Jews enjoying and living their pre-Holocaust lives.

Co-producer Bill Riley, a New York City-based voice coach, said that was a deliberate choice, as opposed to showing those oft-seen horrifying images from the Holocaust of skin-and-bones bodies stacked like cordwood.

He said what's important to remember is each of those bodies represents a life lived fully and richly before the Holocaust, and that's an important part of what the "Sacred Ground" app is about.

"It needs to be about the lives that they led," Riley stated. "And remembering that they were just like me and just like you, until someone declared that they were not. And it's not a declaration that can be made."

Beyond Victimhood

On the app, you can also hear Rabbi Moshe Dov Shualy of Baltimore's Chizuk Amuno Congregation talk about his own family's horror during World War II.

"My name, Moshe Dov, is after my mother's dad, Moshe, who was murdered in the Ukraine in front of her when she was 16 and he was 46," Shualy told CBN News.

He said the Holocaust — or "Shoah" — made him feel like a victim and he wanted to rise above that by creating rituals that would consecrate the millions of lives snuffed out.

So did his Chizuk Amuno cantor Emanuel Perlman. He pointed out, "This is the last generation of Holocaust survivors."

Perlman said he hopes the ritual prayers and music these co-producers put on this app will allow millions to memorialize those survivors and victims on every annual Holocaust Remembrance Day.

"There had never, ever been to my knowledge any special prayers that were composed, written, for the Holocaust," Perlman said.

And so Shualy and Perlman created them for the "Sacred Ground" app.

Rabbi Shualy explained how words have mighty power, saying this is a chance to join along and use them for a sacred good cause: declaring "never again."

"Our power, not just to speak but to consecrate, is an expression that manifests the supreme power that we as human beings have as divine beings," Shualy said.

Co-producer Kiehl chimed in, "That's what I want to do: I want to bring spirit into technology."