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Justice Schmidt pictured in the left photograph second from the right. In the right photograph, his father's concentration camp uniform which now hangs in his chambers.

As courtrooms adjourned for afternoon recess, dozens of judges, court employees and members of the public came together at lunchtime to listen to the somber words of Holocaust memories.

Hon. David Schmidt, a Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice, also spoke. Schmidt did not endure the genocide himself – but his father did, and Schmidt keeps his father’s concentration-camp uniform framed and forever hanging on the wall of his chambers. It is a solemn reminder of what his dad endured not too long ago.

Schmidt’s father was 13 years old when he was shaved and stripped by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp in Poland. The gray-and-white pinstriped prison-uniform was the only thing his father possessed for the next six years. It was what he was wearing for seven days on a train with no food or water, as he and hundreds of other Jews were transported to a death camp in Germany. When they arrived, his father was the lone survivor in the cattle car.

The crowd of listeners did not make a sound during these horrific accounts of history.

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