BERKELEY — Dora Apsan Sorell, an 83-year-old survivor of Auschwitz, first learned of the crisis in Sudan from a television show, the same day her reparations check arrived here.
To her, the desperate people on the TV screen could just as well have been her own family and friends 60 years ago.
"I could just see in front of my eyes our people walking aimlessly, in dirty rags, hungry and bewildered, behind the barbed wires of the camps after being separated from their families," said Sorell, a retired doctor. "Seeing those images left no doubt in my mind that this is another genocide that has to be addressed."
In August, Sorell received $3,043 from the German government as compensation for her slave labor during the Holocaust. She donated it to a group helping refugees in Sudan, victims of what humanitarian groups describe as government-sponsored genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell recently told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Sudanese government and militias bear responsibility for the atrocities and that "genocide may still be occurring."
In the Darfur region of western Sudan, government-backed Arab militias known as janjaweed are staging brutal raids to displace or eliminate the communities of tribal farmers.
Since 2003, more than a million civilians have been displaced. Most are now crowded into refugee camps and towns, where they continue to be murdered, raped and robbed by the militias, according to the nonpartisan organization Human Rights Watch. More than 100,000 have become refugees in neighboring Chad as well.
Sorell sent her reparations money to the American Jewish World Service, a nonprofit in New York that has raised $200,000 in emergency aid for the victims of Darfur.
In turn, the group channels most of the donations to the few humanitarian agencies that have access to refugees in Sudan and Chad, including Doctors Without Borders and the International Rescue Committee.
American Jewish World Service President Ruth Messinger recently returned from a week in Sudan, where she visited three refugee camps. She said she was moved by Sorell's gift. "I literally burst into tears," she said. "I thought it was the most extraordinary gesture."
Born in the northern Transylvania town of Sighet, Sorell had just graduated from high school in 1940 when Adolf Hitler gave upper Romania to the Hungarians in exchange for the extermination of the region's Jews.
