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I saw a guy wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweater while covering the Capitol brawl on January 6. With my fingernails cutting into my hands,
I was as shocked by what I was seeing as I was by the fact that 48% of American people under 40 were unable to identify even one concentration camp, including Auschwitz.
I was familiar with the camp’s name. Prior to his passing last autumn, my father was one of less than 2,000 Auschwitz survivors worldwide.
When I opened my laptop a few weeks after his 94th birthday, I saw him reveal the childhood truths I had been waiting decades to hear.
I recorded my father for two years, telling him memories that had been too traumatic to tell before. I didn’t know much about his experience during World War II since.
I grew up in a Midwest home with four brothers, my physician father, and my mother, who wouldn’t allow us question him about his past. She urged him to keep his history to himself.
Online reports of neo-Nazi propaganda and anti-Semitism serve as a terrifying reminder that the Holocaust is not something we should ignore.
I invited him to tell his experience to the USC Shoah Foundation, a testimony collection organization, when he was 71 years old.
I informed him, “They’ll send someone to videotape you in your home.” “No,” he said, “I’m not ready.” I didn’t ask him again for twenty years.
I was shocked when he said yes. His black and gray hair, his almost wrinkle-free face, and his little Polish accent would all seem ten years younger than they do on paper.
He explained how he saw his life in three separate chapters—before, during, and after the war—while recording our first session. He spoke about his happy upbringing in pre-war Poland.
He recalled ice skating in the winter and swimming in the Plonka River in the summer, and his blue eyes glowed. “In those early days, we were very happy in Poland,” he remarked.
His parents and younger sister moved in with his grandparents when his house was seized by the Germans during their invasion of Poland.
They were then sent to the ghetto at Plonsk, Poland, where they resided from 1940 to 1942, at which point they were sent to Auschwitz.
My father’s expression darkened and he leaned closer as he began Chapter 2. He said that males were transferred to one line.
At Auschwitz shortly after his family’s arrival, while women, children, and the elderly were sent to another. After hurrying from his mother’s line to his father’s,
He was able to fit in with the males despite being tall for a 15-year-old. The elderly and women who could work but did not want to leave their children were escorted away by guards.
My father never again saw his sister or mother. Up until 1944, when my grandpa was transferred to another camp and eventually died, he and his father worked in the same concentration camp.
My father requested me to stop the camera when he finished talking about the loss of his family, and he then lowered his head. As he placed a tissue to his eyes,
I put my arms over his trembling shoulders. I was afraid that asking him to unlock his memories was a mistake.
I said to him, “Dad, we can stop filming.” “No,” he responded, “it’s better to do it now while I’m still here.” As I imagined the difficulties and atrocities he was recounting,
his optimistic outlook remained unwavering. He described how he survived in one camp and then another after I hit the record button.
“My finger got infected somehow while I was working in the kitchen,” he added. He went to the camp hospital after work and was informed that he need surgery.
To decide who was well enough to return to work, checks were conducted once a week. Only their clothing would be recovered after those who weren’t vanished in a truck. My father said,
“The male nurses got me up and dressed me when I was in the camp hospital because they were doing the inspections.”
He never understood why they took this action to save his life. Later on, he was given a job at the clothes warehouse. The guards hurried to clear the camp as the Russians approached.
They sent my father and his father to other camps. My father was put on a forced death march with other inmates before to his transfer to the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in 1945.
After arriving at the train station, they spent days traveling from Poland to Czechoslovakia in open carriages without food or drink. He said, “We just ate the snow because it was snowing.”
Women on their way home from shopping threw bread into the closed train of the convicts as they halted in Czechoslovakia.
He recognized a Polish prisoner from the previous camp when he got to the camp: “He told me, ‘Josef, they lost all the papers, so they don’t know who is who.'”
In order to identify my father as a Pole rather than a Jew, he advised him to swap out his yellow star for a triangular patch.
When the same acquaintance informed him that the hospital needed expert labor, my father went to work there after having previously worked on the V-2 rockets.
My father remained with the medical personnel as the guards put detainees into a train that was headed for Bergen-Belsen.
“The German doctor in charge thought they wouldn’t kill everyone who couldn’t walk, but we thought they would,” he added. As the inmates marched out, he stayed at the hospital with the group.
The massive guard towers were deserted when he woke up the next morning. After dropping their firearms and changing into civilian clothing, the Germans left the camp.
The surviving inmates heard tanks rolling in within an hour or two. The camp was to be liberated by the U.S. Army. In addition to their release, the inmates received clothes and food.
With tears in his eyes, he said, “We ran over and hugged them.” “We were unable to accept that we were free and alive.”
My father told the story of how, at the age of 19, he traveled from Germany to New York, where he was reunited with his aunt, uncle, and first cousin for the shooting of Chapter 3.
He went to Mexico City for medical school after graduating from college. My father, who is 28 years old, began seeing my mother less than a year later.
The two of them were married, had two kids, and then returned to the US, where I was born. I am the first American on both sides of the family.
He was questioned about the number tattooed on his forearm by a patient during his residency. He got the tattoo taken off after seeing her pitying expression.
I recall noticing the tiny blue line that was the sole part of his number, 79777, but I didn’t question him about it.
Until they read his obituary, his patients and their families were unaware that he had survived the Holocaust.