The Soviet army entered Auschwitz — the network of extermination camps
operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland — on Jan. 27, 1945, liberating
the most notorious site of the Holocaust. In the decades since, groups of
survivors have gathered to honor that day — including an annual remembrance
at Auschwitz itself. This year, they mark the 70th anniversary of
liberation on Tuesday — a day that, for a significant portion of remaining
survivors, may be the last major remembrance of their lifetimes. The
numbers themselves tell the story.
Video: The Holocaust's last voices
Henry Greenbaum and Martin Weiss are part of the fading generation of
survivors. As the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
approaches, they show PostTV how they are helping to shape the future by
sharing their past. (Gabe Silverman/The Washington Post)
A decade ago, 1,500 survivors traveled to Auschwitz in southern Poland to
mark the 60th anniversary. This year, organizers are expecting 300 or so.
“This is the last big one for many of the survivors,” said Ronald Lauder,
billionaire philanthropist and president of the World Jewish Congress,
which is financing the travel expenses for more than 100 survivors. “By the
time we reach the 75th anniversary, there may be almost no survivors left.
But they are coming now, because they want to bear witness, to stand there
and say, “we outlasted Hitler. We made it.’”
The survivors partly carry a legacy of horror, memories of the brutality of
a labor prison that, by September of 1941, became an assembly line of death
where more than 1 million would perish at the hands of the Third Reich. The
vast majority of the victims were the Jews of Europe, subjected to Adolf
Hitler’s “Final Solution.” But others also deemed outside the racial and
ideological lines of the Nazis also died. Ethnic Roma. Gays. Jehovah’s
Witnesses. Polish prisoners of war.
*Click to read each story*
‘We were reduced
to a race.’
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2015/01/23/with-fewer-voices-auschwitz-survivors-speak/#boston>
*Anna Ornstein,* Massachusetts
‘That’s when I knew we
were dealing with animals.’
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2015/01/23/with-fewer-voices-auschwitz-survivors-speak/#germany>
*Hermann Höllenreiner,* Germany
‘The world has not
changed at all.’
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2015/01/23/with-fewer-voices-auschwitz-survivors-speak/#israel>
*Marta Wise,* Israel
‘I saw so much, remember
too much of it.’
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2015/01/23/with-fewer-voices-auschwitz-survivors-speak/#france>
*Raphael Esrail,* France
The survivors carry another legacy as well, one even more relevant: The
power of human will to persevere. What follows are the tales of four
survivors of Auschwitz, since resettled in the United States, Israel,
France and southern Germany. Their recollections come amid what for some is
a new period of uncertainty. In France — home of 89-year-old survivor
Raphael Esrail — the anniversary comes less than three weeks after a
terrorist assault on a kosher grocery store in Paris in which four people
lost their lives.
In Israel, Marta Wise, an 80-year-old survivor, sees little cause for
optimism in her adopted home or elsewhere. And in the United States,
survivor Anna Ornstein, an 87-year-old psychoanalyst who has spent a
lifetime treating children in trauma, says humanity has not learned from
the Holocaust, as genocide has continued in many parts of the world.
For Hermann Höllenreiner — an 81-year-old Roma survivor who now lives
outside of Munich — the anniversary comes as concern is growing about the
modern treatment of Roma people across Europe. “I would like to think that
things have changed 70 years later,” Höllenreiner said. “But there is still
discrimination.”
‘The world has not changed at all’
*Marta Wise,* 80
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2015/01/23/with-fewer-voices-auschwitz-survivors-speak/David%20Vaaknin%20for%20The%20Washington%20Post>
Marta Wise, who now resides in Israel, recalls her intimate experiences
with Nazi doctor Josef Mengele while in Auschwitz. In the photo of the camp
at the top of this page, Wise is seventh from the left. (David Vaaknin for
The Washington Post)
JERUSALEM — There are few people alive today who can recall the ominous
grin of the notorious “Angel of Death,” Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Marta
Wise is one of them.
“When he smiled you knew it meant danger, because when he was smiling, that
was when he was at his most sadistic,” said Wise (nee Weiss), an
80-year-old from pre-war Czechoslovakia who lived for two months in
Mengele’s experimental barracks in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
Mengele, a German officer and physician, was known for conducting cruel,
unscientific experiments on inmates, especially Jewish and Gypsy children.
He was obsessed with twins and dwarfs. His “research” included attempts to
turn dark eyes blue and studies into how twins were conceived, likely with
the aim of boosting the fecundity of the Aryan “master race.”
Most of those who came under his care did not survive.
“We lived with a family of Hungarian dwarfs with nine children,” said Wise,
recalling how Mengele bounced a 2-year-old boy on his knee and cooed, “Call
me Uncle Mengele.” Then he injected the toddler with something that made
his skin turn blue, Wise said.
Wise recalled her experiences in an interview earlier this month at Yad
Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, museum and research center in Jerusalem.
She spent her final weeks at the camp in Mengele’s barracks with her older
sister, Eva.
She and her sister, she said, were also injected with a substance, although
they never discovered what.
Just before the camp’s liberation, Wise had one of her most intimate
moments with the Nazi doctor. After her sister became sick and was placed
in the camp hospital, Mengele allowed Wise to visit her.
Graphic: The survivors
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/murder-on-an-industrial-scale/2015/01/22/b957f9a6-a28e-11e4-9f89-561284a573f8_graphic.html>
Of the number of Jews who were in camps and ghettos, or hiding under Nazi
occupation, an estimated 100,555 are still alive. Click to see the full
graphic. (Gene Thorp/The Washington Post)
“It must have tickled this monster to see this half-dead child come to help
her sick, half-dead sister every day,” said Wise, describing how she met
Mengele walking to the clinic one day.
A few days later, Russian soldiers arrived and freed the survivors.
“They did not have much but they gave us what they had,” she said,
remembering how one soldier handed her a bottle of vodka. Although Wise was
only 10 years old, the war and living in hiding before her capture had
taught her that commodities could buy life. After they were freed, the
sisters gave the vodka to a truck driver who helped them return home to
their parents in Bratislava, today the capital of Slovakia.
Before the war, Wise and her sister lived with their parents and eight
siblings in a luxurious house in a prestigious neighborhood of Bratislava.
Their father, Eugen Weiss, was a self-made textile merchant who was
initially considered an “essential Jew” by the Nazis for his business
prowess.
It was his mix of business smarts and deep pessimism that helped him save
himself, his wife and all but one of his children during the war. In the
early years, Wise and her siblings were shipped to relatives in Hungary.
Later, Wise and Eva posed as orphaned Aryan girls.
“We went to school every day and to church on Sundays,” Wise said.
It was the perfect cover for the blond, green-eyed girls until neighbors
grew suspicious. They were finally arrested on Oct. 8, 1944 — Wise’s 10th
birthday — and less than a month later they arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“Some survivors say no one helped them, but we had a different experience,”
Wise said. “People always tried to help us, and we tried to help people
wherever we could.”
But survival, she learned, “is really just pure luck.”
Wise, who moved with her family to Australia in 1948, said her parents
never spoke of the war.
“Eva and I did not mention one word about Auschwitz until 1995,” she said,
when Eva, who still lives in Australia, spoke at a commemoration event.
Mengele fled Germany and lived in exile in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil
until he died in 1979.
Wise, a mother of three, grandmother of 14 and great-grandmother of five,
immigrated to Israel with her husband in 1998. She is warm and friendly,
but what she has to say is not soothing.
“I used to be an optimist until a few years ago, but the situation in the
Middle East has changed and the world does not notice anything,” she said,
speaking days after the terror attacks in Paris. “Reading the newspaper in
the past few days is just like reading the newspaper in the 1930s.”
“The world has not changed at all,” Wise said. “The bottom line is it can
happen again and it is happening again in many places, not necessarily to
the Jews, but to anyone.”
*—Ruth Eglash.*
On Monday, January 26, 2015 at 9:27:30 AM UTC-6, KeithInTampa wrote:
>
> Woman remembers liberation from Auschwitz 70 years later
>
> http://www.dallasnews.com/news/headlines/20150125-woman-remembers-liberation-from-auschwitz-70-years-later.ece
>
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