A survivor

Photo a poster by Stephen Morris, taken from www.art.com

The minute he buzzed me in I felt a knot in my stomach. I had done this probably a thousand times, but this one was different. This one was important. This one was serious.

I took the elevator and pressed 6. As the cabin was rising, on its way to the 6th floor, the questions were dancing in my head but I couldn’t decide where to begin. How do you raise a subject like this one, without insulting, hurting, bringing back memories beyond painful?

He was waiting for me by the door. An old man of 81, frail as his age would permit, but still standing poised with a dignity I had never spotted in anyone in the past.

He welcomed me in his home and showed me in his living room. His eyes were the deepest gray I had ever seen. As gray as the photos we see of a time as ugly as humanity itself.

I politely refused his offer of coffee or tea (I did not want to tire him, his wife was not home) and looked for a way to start the discussion. “Ask me anything you want. I feel like I can trust you, so ask away”, he said, sensing my hesitation. “I wouldn’t like to be the one bringing ugly thoughts back into your mind”, I said, completely honest about the way I felt. He smiled, and it was the smile of a man who has seen it all. “It is all in the past”, he said to me. “After all these years, I am not afraid to talk about it”. He lifted his sleeve slightly and showed me his arm. “There is a number etched on my skin that makes me think of it every day, no matter how many years have passed”.

He had been number 115.365 for 3 years. He watched helpless as his mother, father and younger brother burnt in the ovens of Auschwitz. He stood speechless as countless friends, loved ones, acquaintances, neighbors faded away from hunger, malnutrition, illness, eventually gassed to death in the gas chambers and finally stacked in mountains of horror in front of their eyes “to show us what our future was”. He learned of medical experiments done to the person he shared a bed with at the camp, he was beaten to exhaustion, to near death. He learned to live with terror and not succumb to it. “We didn’t pay attention to fear. We learned to recognize it and then ignore it. This is human nature. This is the only way to survive”, he said.

When the doors of the camps opened and they were free to go, he was 18. He weighed 27 kilos (59 pounds). A few months later, doctors removed bone from his leg to add it to his back: it had been destroyed from the beatings.

Today there’s a group of people who question whether the Holocaust ever happened. They claim that it was a Jewish conspiracy to gain the worlds compassion. They claim no Jews ever died during World War II. They claim the concentration camps never existed. They claim that the only thing history can accuse Hitler for is that he started a job he never finished. I met a man who can prove the opposite.