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Roman Ferber, of New York, returns to Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time
in 50 years. He was at this concentration camp when he was eleven years
old, fighting for his life and the life of his cousin Willie, whose parents
were killed by the Plaszow camp commandant, Eamon Goeth. |
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Ferber climbs on a shelf of one barrack in Birkenau, an industrial murder
park where 1.5 million Jews were vaporized in three and a half years. Ten
or more slept on each shelf. Ferber was born in Cracow, Poland and was first
taken to the Plaszow camp, then Auschwitz, where he survived by organizing
boys to pull garbage wagons. His brother died in Plaszow and his father
was injected with gasoline on the last day of the war. He had survived until
that very last day, but they just wouldn't let him live. |
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Ferber stands in the ruins of Crematorium II at Birkenau, which opened March
13, 1943. Topf and Sohne, of Erfurt, built five sets of these special ovens.
The Germans could kill 10,000 people a day in the five crematoria here.
Ferber, one of the youngest Schindler Jews, was sent to Auschwitz in the
winter of 1944, snatched by the SS when Oskar Schindler was away from Brinnlitz.
He and his cousin, Willie, walked out on Jan. 27, 1945 when the Russians
liberated the camp. They walked back to his hometown, Cracow, avoiding the
Polish underground groups, such as The Home Army, which killed Jewish survivors. |
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A tourist family enters an Auschwitz gas chamber. In 1943, Himmler told
his SS generals, "You all know what it is like when 50 bodies are there,
or 100 or 500. To be able to have done this and to remain decent, that has
made us great." More than 250,000 people died on death marches from
the camp in 1945. |
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Anna Hyndrakova, of Prague, smuggled photos of her mother, and sister, Trude,
into the labor camps. They perished in the gas chambers, along with her
father, brother-in-law and her niece. When the Nazis took over Prague in
March, 1939, the Jews lost all human and civil rights. Anna was 14 when
she was deported with her family to Theresienstadt in 1942, and later, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
They tattooed a number on her arm, then Anna and her mother reported for
selection together, filing naked past a committee of SS-men, most of them
drunk. She had just turned 16 and was selected for work. They didn't take
her mother, and her father said he wouldn't leave her mother. She and her
parents were parting forever.
"The SS-men yelled, I cried, my parents kept telling me to go but kept
holding on to my hands! I shall never forget that moment. I can still see
them. I didn't know what I should do. I wanted to be with them, but I probably
also wanted to live.
"For a long time I reproached myself for my decision to leave Birkenau.
I felt I'd betrayed my promise to my sister that I would look after our
parents. It still haunts me to this day."
Anna had photographs of her mother, father and sister. With a pair of nail
scissors, she cut out just their heads, wrapped them in cellophane and hid
them in her hair under a bobby pin. She kept transferring her treasures
when she was in the Women's Camp, in the showers. Once she had them in her
mouth and had to open it. 'What's that you've got in your mouth, you elephant?'
the guard said. 'Photos' I replied. 'Whose?' 'Mom's.' 'Get along then' she
said and so I smuggled them through."
Two of those pictures are all she has left. |
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Lou Salton, founder of the Salton kitchenware company, stands in a national
forest preserve ten miles from his Polish birthplace, Wieliczka. His father,
grandmother, step-mother and step-sister were shot here, along with all
Jews in the town. Poles dug pits and threw people in, burying many alive.
Salton left Cracow in 1940, but his grandmother refused to go, so the rest
of his family stayed and were killed. His mother and sister were choked
in gas vans by carbon monoxide from diesel engines. The Saurer Company of
Austria supplied the vans and they killed his relatives and 580,000 other
Jews in Belzec.
Salton, 82, returned to find his family's death place. Surviving Jews had
dedicated a stone to their memory. There were no signs, no paths leading
to it. We found it only with the help of an old peasant. Salton stood where
his father had 52 years earlier. All around us the trees were dying of pollution
from Cracow and from fallout from Chernobyl. |
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This Pole is at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, selling photos of Jews kneeling
in a town center during World War II, waiting to be executed. He is trying
to make money off the Jewish mourners who returned for the 50th anniversary
of the Warsaw ghetto.
Survivor Abraham Aviel, then 14, described a similar scene in the white
Russian village of Radun. "We were brought to the marketplace in the
middle of town. We were told to kneel, heads down. Of course we saw from
the corner of our eyes the people who tried to run away were shot right
there." The 3,400 Jews of Radun were taken to the Jewish cemetery and
shot at specially prepared pits. More than 1,600 were women; more than 800
were children. Aviel noticed a group of Jews who dug the graves. Knowing
that his brother was in that group, he was able to join them. His thought
was always, 'One must survive - uberleben - and tell what happened. |
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Rose and Isak Arbuz, from New York, stand in front of the Warsaw grave commemorating
his brother, his brother's girlfriend and another couple who were part of
the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. Their skeletons were recovered from
a basement and were buried together.
The Jews fought from April 19 to May 16, longer than France and Poland fought
against the Germans. There were only 220 insurgents against 2,090 Germans,
Ukranians and Latvians. "All it was about, finally, was that we not
just let them slaughter us when our turn came," wrote Marek Edelman,
the last surviving leader of the uprising. "It was only a choice as
to the manner of dying." |
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A survivor burns a yahrzheit, or memorial candle, for the 840,000 people
who were murdered in the Majdanek camp, on the eastern outskirts of Lublin
in white Russia. As at Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Birkenau,
the scenes at Majdanek had few, if any, parallels in the catalogue of human
evil. |
In the Lublin region, on November 2, 1943, an operation, given the code
name "Harvest Festival" by the Germans, was begun. Its object
was the murder of those survivors of the Warsaw ghetto uprising who had
been held since April in labor camps at Poniatowa, Trawniki and elsewhere
in the Lublin region. In a few days, fifty thousand Jews were shot in ditches
behind the gas-chambers of Majdanek, among them more than five thousand
Jewish soldiers of the Polish army, who had been held prisoner for the previous
four years in the Lipowa Street camp in Lublin. Brought to Majdanek in small
groups from Lipowa Street on Nov. 2, the instinct for survival could not
be crushed. Led by a former Hebrew teacher, with the surname Szosnik, the
Jews broke through the armed guards shouting, "Long live freedom."
The SS opened fire. Most of the prisoners were killed. According to Krakowski's
"War of the Doomed," ten were able to escape. Other Jews from
the Lipowa Street camp, also former soldiers, were taken to Majdanek and
refused to the last moment to remove their army uniforms. They, too, were
shot. Only one camp in the Lublin region escaped the "Harvest Festival"
slaughter, that at Budzyn, whose labor was needed to operate the Heinkl
aircraft works. But even at Budzyn, all elderly people were "selected"
in November, 1943 and taken to Majdanek. One of the Jewish cleaners in the
camp, Jacob Katz, saved the lives of seven elderly Jews by hiding them under
mattresses during the selection, and later smuggling in bread to them. The
rest, taken to Majdanek, were shot.
