Maine Survivors Remember The Holocaust

(upbeat music) (projector clicking) - Have you ever wondered where the television signal you're watching is coming from?

♪ True North (projector clicking) - Welcome to True North.

(upbeat music) (mysterious music) - Good evening and welcome to Mainewatch (upbeat music) (projector clicking) - Welcome to "From the Vault", a celebration of 60 years of Maine Public Television.

JANUARY 27 IS INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBERANCE DAY A TIME TO HONOR AND REMEMBER THE MILLIONS WHO DIED DURING THIS MOST HORRIFIC TIME IN HISTORY.

ON THIS EPISODE WE GO TO 1994 WITH MA INE SURVIVORS REMEMBER THE HOLOCAUST WE WILL HEAR FIRST HAND ACCOUNTS FROM 8 MAINE RESIDENTS WHO RELATE THEIR STORIES OF HORROR AND SURVIVAL.

AS YOU MAY EXPECT, THIS PROGRAM INCLUDES GRAPHIC PICTURES, FILM AND DESCRIPTIONS OF EVENTS THAT VIEWERS MAY FIND DISTURBING AND MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR ALL AUDIENCES.

TH IS PROGRAM IS NEARLY 30 YEARS AN D MANY OF THE PARTICIPANTS HAVE PASSED AWAY.

BU T THEY HAVE LEFT THIS PROGRAM AS A LEGACY AND OF A TIME IN HISTORY THAT WE MUST NOT ONLY NEVER FORGET, B UT LEARN FROM AS WELL.

MA INE HAS SEVERAL RESOURCES REGARDING HOLOCAUST EDUCATION.

TH E HOLOCAUST AND HUMAN RIGHTS CENTER AT UNIVERSITY OF MAINE AT AUGUSTA HAS JUST RECENTLY REOPENED THE MICHAEL KLAHR CENTER.

IT FEATURES MANY EXHIBITS AND EVENTS.

PLEASE VISIT THEM ONLINE TO SEE ALL THAT THEY OFFER.

AND NOW, LETS GO BACK TO 1994 WITH MAINE SURVIVORS REMEMBER THE HOLOCAUST.

(s low violin music) - I was born in a small town in Germany, Ansbach, very pretty, medieval, rock and coal town.

My parents have been living there for years.

My grandparents, my father was the Jewish butcher in town.

I had a sister, we were an extended family.

grandmother, aunts, uncles, father, and mother.

And we lived there happily.

My childhood was very nice, and peaceful, and happy, and I thought we would live there forever.

(slow violin music) - [Narrator] For centuries, Jews had mingled with other Europeans, sinking deep roots in the life of every country in Europe.

Jews were farmers, store owners, doctors, political leaders, factory workers, army officers, writers.

The Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, created and cultivated a special hatred for Jews, and singled them out for total elimination.

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis murdered an estimated 6 million Jews.

By bullet, by gas, by starvation.

A thousand years of Jewish culture were wiped out in a decade.

The Nazis also killed millions of Christian Poles and Russians, gypsies, and communists, priests and ministers, homosexuals, Jehovah's witnesses, and people with mental disabilities.

This fiery destruction is known as the Holocaust.

(slow violin music) Some of the Jewish Europeans who survived the Holocaust live among us in Maine.

Here, they found a peaceful haven, a place to heal, raise families, and freely develop talents.

They are our friends and neighbors, teachers, librarians, writers, artists, and community leaders.

Yet they can not escape their memories of the Holocaust.

This film tells their story, listen to their words.

- (sings in foreign language) - [Narrator] On the night of January 30th, 1933, 18 year old Kurt Messerschmidt was on a street car returning home after attending a theater performance in Berlin.

- At about 11:00 p.m, the street car had to come to a stop.

All the streets in a very large section of Berlin were cordoned off, and I soon could see what was happening.

First I heard the marching steps of people carrying torches.

I realized those were Nazis, who in their brown shirts, celebrated their coming to power on that fateful day.

We had to get off the streetcar, and had to try to find our way home using all kinds of detours.

And it took much longer than it would have normally taken.

I reached my home at about five minutes before midnight, and I rushed to a little radio.

And while I was listening, immediately being captivated by the voice I had been listening to for years, it was cut off very abruptly at the stroke of 12 midnight.

And immediately followed the voice of this devilish propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.

And at that point, I felt my whole life, together with the life possibly of the world, took a turn around.

- Slowly things began to change.

We saw billboards on the streets, urging everyone to vote for Hitler.

And our friends didn't talk to us freely anymore.

The school friends that I had ignored me, the boys would throw stones at me, and I was being ostracized, I was the enemy.

- It was very frustrating, especially being told you're a guest when you were born in a place and didn't know any other place.

And it was very confusing to a child of 10 or 11, to be told you don't belong, when you never belonged anywhere else.

- Of course, once I was declared a Jew, I had to wear the Star of David.

This is the one that had to be on my left chest.

And further, in front of my room, the room that I slept in, I had to have a white Star of David.

In addition to this, of course, I could not own a pet.

We had a canary in the room that I slept.

there was a canary, that canary had to be moved because of course, as a Jew, I could not own a pet or have a pet and even in the same room with me.

I could not use a German barber.

I could not use a German doctor.

I could not use public transportation, and I could not own a bicycle.

- The SS had come, and there was a store down the block, and they'd pulled the owner of the store out, and literally pulled his hair out, and pulled his beard out, and beat him unmercifully.

And I was witness to this, and came in.

My grandmother didn't know it was happening.

I came in, and that was the end of going outside on the front of the house.

- We were slowly conditioned into the role of victim.

We were the ones that were haunted.

We looked it, and we acted it.

We didn't even need that yellow star on our left chest.

The fear in our eyes gave us away.

(Nazis chanting in German) - [Narrator] Jewish businesses were boycotted.

Jews were fired from the civil service, excluded from the armed forces, physically harassed in the streets.

Most Germans stood by silently.

And in 1935, the Nuremberg Laws took German citizenship away from Jews, from 1933 to 1938, the Nazi government had succeeded in isolating German Jews.

During these years, about a third of the Jewish population managed to leave the country, though only a few nations would accept German Jewish immigrants.

Then suddenly, in the fall of 1938, the German government struck with violence.

- A German diplomat was shot in Paris by a young Jew.

Hitler used that event to take terrible revenge on all the Jews in Germany.

(trumpet music) - [Narrator] In just one night, 300 synagogues were destroyed, and 7,000 Jewish businesses demolished.

The shattered windows of Jewish stores gave this orgy of violence it's name, Kristallnacht, night of broken glass.

The next morning, five-year-old Ava Tevvs took a walk with her grandmother.

- My grandmother took me out of the house, and we went for a walk into what had been my world, my neighborhood, this is all I knew, and everything was charred, everything was black.

Windows were broken everywhere, the synagogue was destroyed.

People were lamenting.

All I can remember is looking down and seeing all this remnants of things.

And people were sitting around, they were weeping, they were crying, and I did not know what happened, but it was a trauma for me because it was the beginning of a blackness, it was the beginning of actually seeing destruction in it's full force.

And after that, no one seemed to be the same.

- [Narrator] In the wake of Kristallnacht, German and Austrian Jews were uprooted.

30,000 Jewish men were arrested, 30,000.

Jews discovered the deadly world of concentration camps, like Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachnsenhausen.

Families were torn from their homes.

- We were all sent to a collection center.

The men were taken away to prison, and the women and children were let go home early the next morning.

At home, an SS man waited and took possession of our house.

My mother was given a very small sum of money for that beautiful home that we had lived in for all these years, and we were told to get out of town, or we would never see our man again.

The decision was easy, we left town, we left our house behind, we carried only what we could.

We took along only what we could carry, and walked to the railroad station.

I looked at my mother with admiration.

She had never made a decision in all her life.

She was a protected woman, totally dependent on her husband, and on the decisions her husband made for her.

And here she was, for the first time, on her own.

And so I can still see ourselves walking to the railroad station, my sister, 17 years old.

I, a naive and very protected 15 year old.

And we took a ticket to Munich, and left into the unknown.

(somber music) - [Narrator] Emboldened by their successful occupation of Austria and Czechoslovakia, the Nazis were ready to conquer the rest of Europe.

Twelve-year-old Walters Ziffer watched the retreating Polish army rush through his town as the Germans invaded Poland, World War II had begun.

- Well, it was on September 1st, 1939.

Our city was totally silent, no one in the streets.

You could have heard a pin drop on the sidewalk, literally.

When suddenly, there were a sort of a roaring sound coming closer and closer.

We had no idea what it was.

Our apartment was on the second floor of a big building on Main Street in this town.

And suddenly, a flood of people on just jammed Main Street, coming almost out of nowhere.

And it was a motley crowd, in that there were peasants on carriages, horse-drawn carriages.

There were goats being driven, there were cows being driven, there were horses being driven.

In between, you saw retreating Polish soldiers.

Some cavalry units, some just marching.

Everything was totally chaotic, and that lasted for about an hour, if I remember correctly.

Then the town fell completely silent, and then I remember distinctly the sound of a single airplane up in the air circling above the town, and shots fired at that airplane, I thought.

The airplane didn't come down, it disappeared.

And then again, complete silence.

An hour or two later, my sister and I were glued against the windows of Main Street to see what was happening.

I was 12, my sister was 16 at the time.

And here came a motorcycle with a sidecar, occupied by two SS officers, who simply drove through Main Street.

And shortly after them came personnel carriers, more motorcycles, trucks filled with soldiers.

All sort of war related material, but in perfect order.

Soldiers marching in, as it were.

And I must say, and I hate to say it.

That both my sister and I, my father didn't look out of the window nor did my mother, were very impressed by the orderliness.

The men, for instance, the SS people whom we saw were really beautiful, beautiful people, good looking men, beautiful uniforms, very, very impressive.

And then came a whole unit of SS again at the end of this march through, you might say.

And by that time, we knew that we were occupied by the German Reich, by Hitler's people.

- [Narrator] Poland fell in four weeks.

After overrunning Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and France, the German forces in 1941, launched a massive attack on the Soviet Union.

As the Germans swept through Soviet territory, more than a million Jews were killed in mass shootings carried out by special SS forces.

At the same time, Jews in the rest of Nazi occupied Europe were forced out of their homes and into urban ghettos.

- When the Germans came into our city, they didn't know who is a Jew and who is not a Jew.

The non-Jewish neighbors, the kids, and the adults used to point out a Jew.

And then they used to take us away.

They take away some Jews and we never saw them again.

And in 1941, right before the high holidays, the Germans made a ghetto.

The ghetto was in a place in the Jewish section, where a lot of Jewish people lived there.

There was the Jewish hospital, the Jewish home for the aged, the synagogue was there.

And one night, the Germans, with the help of the Ukrainian and Lithuanian police, came in there and took out all the Jews from this section.

And they drove them to outskirts of Vilna, in a place, Ponary, that was in the woods.

And there, they killed them there.

And a couple of weeks later, they round up all the Jews from the city and suburbs, and put them all in this section from where they took out the Jews before.

And when we came into their houses, we saw some food on a table.

Some plates was still standing on a table.

Some were asleep already, their pillows were carved in, you can see their head was there.

And they crowded us in, in those apartments.

We live three families to a two room apartment.

We didn't have any bathrooms there, the sanitary conditions were very bad.

And we had to go out in the outhouses, but we manage, we did our best because we still were hoping that this wouldn't last too long.

We didn't know what was going on.

We used to hear stories when the refugees were coming in and tell us what was going on, we didn't believe them.

We said it couldn't happen to us.

The Germans couldn't do those things, but it happened to us.

(chanting music) - I'd lost my family, I'd lost my citizenship.

And I was sent to Theresienstadt.

Which was a, not a death camp, but a ghetto.

It turned out that it was only a collection center again, because from there, the Jews were again sent on to Auschwitz, and Majdanek, and Bergen-Belsen.

First I stayed there, living on a straw mattress in the barracks, we did menial jobs.

I swept the streets 12 hours a day.

At noon time, we took our little assigned pot and went to a place where they dished out the soup and a piece of bread, we could never get enough to eat.

- [Narrator] Ghettos were only the first step in the Nazi's plan to murder every Jew in Europe.

Six special camps designed to kill Jews by poison gas were secretly constructed in Poland.

Chelmno, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

By 1942, they were ready.

And unsuspecting Jews from all over Europe were jammed into cattle cars and shipped by train to these killing camps.

(train carriages rustling on the train tracks) - When the train stopped, we were in Birkenau.

We were told to get off the train, leave everything on the train, it would be brought to us later on.

As we got off the train, we saw the SS and the dogs.

And I can't tell you which frightened me more, either the dogs or the SS.

They were men in uniform.

They looked right through us and just barked at us orders, and it was unbelievably frightening for all of us.

(chanting music) - We jumped off the train, and I had noticed that the sick, and the dead, and the crazed were all thrown into a pile.

So I parried for my family for a few minutes to see whatever happened to them.

I saw this enormous pile, a pile as tall as a house, the dead, the dying, and the insane all together.

And I had a feeling that they would be burned on the spot.

I was afraid that I'd go crazy myself and be thrown right on top of it.

My former German professor was among the insane, I recognized him.

And so was a young woman who'd gone crazy on a trip in Dirlewanger.

Afterwards, they announced there would be separation and very calmly said, "Well, the men will go left, "and the women to the right, to the showers."

That was logical, we didn't think anything of it.

We expected to meet again after the showers, and we didn't say goodbye.

Wives and husbands parted without even a goodbye.

Next, they separated everyone under 16 or over 40 to go left, and they said they're gonna have more comfortable quarters.

Again, we believed it.

My two grandmothers and my aunt Ethel, went to the left.

That's the last I ever saw of them.

And all the little children went with their young mothers.

They did not object, most of the time they allowed the young mothers to go with them, and they were gassed at night, we now know, we had no idea then.

That's how the remnant of a family was cut in two.

(chanting music) - [Narrator] For most who stepped off the trains, death was only hours away.

With terrible efficiency, the Nazis lined up millions of Jews, killed them in gas chambers, and burned their bodies in crematoria.

A small number were spared death in the gas chambers when they were selected for slave labor.

They endured a daily routine of brutality and dehumanization, few survived these conditions.

- We were in concentration camp, and first we were in Kaiserwald for one year.

The second concentration camp was Stutthof, it was worse there, it was a very bad concentration camp.

It was very a lot of people there, very crowded, and we weren't allowed to go out to wash ourselves.

We weren't allowed to go to the bathroom by ourselves.

We had to wait for our capo, for our overseer to take us whenever she felt like.

We were sick in this concentration camp, we were sick with typhoid, with scarlet fever, with all kinds of sicknesses.

And we weren't allowed to go to see a doctor, we had to nurse ourselves, people were dying like flies.

Those who survived were like animals.

We were happy that somebody died near us.

We could have their clothes to wear, and have their rags to keep our feet warm, because it was winter, and it was very, very cold there.

Some women couldn't take it anymore.

They used to sneak out during the night, and touch the barbed electrified wires and killed themselves.

But I wasn't brave enough to do those things.

I try to live and help my sister, and my sister helped me, and we survive this way somehow.

- My last camp was a camp by the name of Waldenburg, which was a satellite camp of the extermination camp of Gross-Rosen.

By then I had become pretty much of a vegetable, Really didn't think much anymore, and everybody else was in the same kind of shape I was.

The only thing that I do remember having talked about with fellow inmates.

And in fact, those were conversations that took place in the barracks, as well as at the workplace, was discussions about food, always food, food, food.

And what preoccupied us and what engaged us in a sort of a philosophical conversation is how to eat our bread.

Now, what we did receive at night for the last three, four years was a chunk of bread, which weighed anywhere between eight and 12 ounces.

If the guy liked you, who cut the bread, he cut it a little bigger.

If he didn't like you, he cut it a little smaller, but still you had a chunk of bread.

And so the question came up, how are you going to eat the bread?

Some inmate philosophers, food philosophers, felt that the bread should be eaten in one chunk at night when received.

And that way you had a pretty good feeling in your stomach.

And I followed that particular philosophy, I ate it as soon as I got it.

But then there were other possibilities that had to be considered.

Breaking the bread in half, and eating half of it, and keeping the other half on oneself or in the straw on the bunk.

Then you ran the risk of the bread being stolen, of course.

And some felt that the bread should be just crumbled up, kept in your pocket, and you just eat all along, a little crumbs of bread that kept your juices flowing.

I didn't subscribe to that, I wanted to have this feeling in my belly, to have a little something solid in it.

And that was by the way, the only solid food we received for 24 hours.

(chanting music) - They were constant roll calls.

We sat down and before we knew it, we had to be out again for another roll call.

It was constant.

- We been three weeks in Auschwitz-Birkenau, when there was this enormous selection.

In retrospect, my former comrades tell me it was Dr. Mengele conducted it, but at the time, I didn't know.

And fairly young officer.

The capo was a God among us, told us to undress, which was easy, all we had is one rag or one blanket, and hold whatever clothes we had above our heads.

And to form a single line, so we did, and we marched.

Thousands and thousands of women in this long line, swirling around.

I looked at it and I thought, this is unreal.

How could anyone even imagine it?

And I thought, someday, I'd like to have a movie of this.

So people will know what happened in the world in this century.

I thought about the "Brave New World", which I had just read recently.

And I thought, this is just more beastly, more incredible.

Thousands and thousands of women, shaven in the crotch and on the head.

And passing by, this one male officer, All dressed up in military attire, with hat, white gloves, and tie, holding a pistol.

Next to him was one of the capos and a dog.

Some of us been bleeding from lashes, and the dog was trying to lick the bleeding parts.

I was more scared of them than of people.

The gun at the moment did not worry me.

As we walked by Mengele, my mother went first.

And I was scared that she'll be sent left.

'Cause the sick and the older ones were sent left, and they were piled like they had been piled right on arrival.

This was a truck, but they were one on top of the other, and it didn't seem that they could breathe.

And one felt that that would be death, although we didn't know about gas chambers,.

I was scared for mother, but Mengele sent her ahead.

We hoped for first labor, there was a train waiting for this group.

What scared me then is to be sent to the right.

A group of young girls were marching off to the right, all naked, all tall, strong, and good looking.

And I had been warned by my uncle, "Never go on a girl's transport", because he knew that the Jewish girls being sent to the Russian front, and there to be raped.

I was desperate, stay with my mother, desperate to avoid a girl's transport.

When Mengele sent me to the ride, to follow the girls, I just couldn't face it.

And I said, "I'm going with my mother."

And the German woman said, "Don't do that, he'll shoot you."

I wasn't scared of it, I said, "Let him."

I was much more scared to be sent to the right.

So I followed mother, and I felt a spot tingling in my back because he pointed the gun at me.

And I thought, this will be it, but he didn't shoot.

At that moment, as I looked back, my aunt, Magda, who was a young woman, very beautiful, was also running after me, and she said, "She's my mother too."

She lied because of the fright, and because she hoped she could come too.

And Mengele did not shoot us.

(army drum music) - [Narrator] The German advance into the Soviet Union was halted, and the German armies were forced to retreat, but nothing was allowed to interfere with the mass murder of Jews.

Only the approach of the Soviet armies in 1944, stopped the gas chambers in Poland.

The Nazis tried to cover up their crimes by destroying the camps and forcing the survivors to march back towards Germany.

- In December, it was a very cold winter.

The Germans decided to liquidate this concentration camp, but this time, they didn't take us by cattle cars.

We had to march, we didn't have enough clothes, whatever we had on ourselves, that's all we could carry anyway.

While we were walking, we saw some people lying on the ground frozen, dead.

We knew there are transport with Jews went by there.

And people were dying walking.

Some women tried to bend over to get some ice to wet their lips, and those who bent over were shot.

Those who helped walk somebody else, they were shot.

- And whoever stumbled and couldn't get up immediately was shot on the spot.

This was the idea of the whole thing.

- [Narrator] In the spring of 1945, the allied armies from the west and the Soviet armies from the east met in Germany.

The Germans surrendered.

American soldiers, who liberated camps like Nordhaausen in Germany, and Mauthausen in Austria, witnessed the meaning of the war for Jews.

Bill Millar entered Nordhausen in April, 1945.

- The most outstanding impression that I have, and it'll be one that'll live with me all my entire life.

And that is the smell.

The smell was just absolutely unbelievable.

It was the smell of unsanitary conditions, of decaying, flesh, of mud, and dirt, and just about everything, you name it, and it was there.

We found that some of the prisoners were in barracks, and I don't know whether you could call 'em dormitories, but they were in barracks.

They were stacked up in these wooden bins, just almost like cordwood.

When you'd look up at them, you'd see, they'd look at you with this absolutely ghastly, deadly stare.

And you couldn't tell whether they were dead or alive.

And once in a while, somebody would move their head, so you would automatically assume that that individual was alive, otherwise you'd have to assume that they were dead.

They had a small crematorium at Nordhausen.

And when we got there, there were some bodies still stacked up outside that apparently they hadn't had the chance to cremate.

And the situation was really so bad that the division commander ordered the battalion, the medical battalion to go in and do what they could do to help these prisoners.

- When the American tanks rolled into Mauthausen, we were all there to greet them.

And I should say, it was a wonderful, wonderful moment.

And it probably was, but thinking back, I know that all of us were numb.

We felt maybe some kind of a relief, but there was no joy.

There was just a numbness.

We saw them, and we looked at them, they looked back at us, but we didn't feel anything.

- My father died, my grandmothers been gassed.

My four uncles died, we don't know where, we don't know where they were buried.

Magda's young husband died.

Most of my Jewish neighbors, friends, all my Jewish classmates died that year.

Of 5,000 Jews taken from my hometown, only 250 of us survived, 5%.

- Why did I survive?

I am here today, I live today.

I am aware of the past, and I'm happy it is the past.

What we have to do is.

If anything, this would put a tremendous obligation on myself.

And it was obvious that I had to find out, or I had to make sure that my survival was not just a quirk of fate, but a fate that demanded a positive response on my part.

- After a while, I began to feel the need to write about what I had gone through.

For my own children, for my own sake, and for other people.

Now, I have received a contract to write another book.

This one is for younger audience, for a young adult group, because the younger generation, the younger men and women that are growing up now have no idea what the Holocaust was all about, even don't believe it.

And I feel it is my duty to put it on paper.

Once again, addressed to a younger audience.

And I feel good about it, and I'm happy about it.

And it's giving a purpose to my survival, which in itself was a gift.

- I spent 10 years writing, doing research, going back to Hungary, to Auschwitz, to Germany.

Now, I've been giving talks on the Holocaust to various audiences, various religions.

Lots of times, to young people who seem to identify with my problems, and it seems to help them with their own.

- Obviously, the example of the Holocaust has not deterred people to still remain prejudice, and to kill each other, and to do immense harm to humankind.

I'm afraid once it happens, it can happen again.

(soft somber music) (somber bass music) - [Speaker Woman] The barracks are empty now.

They are silent, scrubbed clean, but anguish and pain are embedded in the walls.

And memories of the Holocaust will live long after the buildings fall to the ground.

(somber bass music) - I was liberated on May 8th, 1945, by single Soviet tank that ran into our barbed wire fences and just crushed them.

And we were technically free.

We didn't know what to do with ourselves.

I had retrogressed in the four years that I had been in camp.

I think I was much less functional, and much less intelligent at 18 than I was at 14.

In any case, we were totally lost.

Our first thought was getting food.

A man next to me finally broke the ranks, and we went to the city of Waldenburg, climbed on a truck, on a German army truck that was loaded with German army rations.

Somehow managed to open the can, was white grease, stuffed it into her mouths, it was pork grease.

Underneath were chunks of pork, we stuffed that into her mouths.

Can, after can, after can, then my friend ripped open a sack, it was sugar, spilled into the truck bed.

We got on our fours, on all fours like animals, and we lapped up the sugar, and then we passed out.

When I woke up, I was in a little bedroom between two white sheets.

People had observed us, an old woman actually had observed us from the first floor of the house, alerted the neighbor, and they dragged us up, both my friend and me.

Stuck us in bed, we lay there, I think a day and a half roughly, just in a sort of a coma.

I woke up, as I said, shortly afterwards, the woman walked into the room.

She saw me lying there with open eyes.

She sat down on my bed and said to me, "Now it's all over.

"We lost the war, you're free."

This didn't sink in, I didn't know what to do.

We stayed another two days.

The only thing we finally did know to do was to go back to the camp.

That was the only solution for us, and there we saw everybody's still there.

Little fires were going.

People were roasting potatoes, and beets, and making soups, and what have you.

And so I joined in with them and became one of them again.

But we went back to camp, to that horrible camp, because we had no idea what to do with our freedom.

- At the end of those death marches, especially of my own experience.

We arrived in the city of Traunstein, near the Austrian border.

We were more or less living, or hardly living corpses.

All power had left us, all strength.

And we were just dragging ourselves, being unable to communicate with each other or speak to each other.

In April 30th, 1945, it was obviously close to the end of the war.

We heard American planes and American tanks roll by, and the SS became uneasy.

They had been killing all the way.

Anybody who walked out of line, or tried to steal something in a field.

This killing had stopped.

In the evening, we arrived at Traunstein.

And I saw a little building with a low opening door.

I saw pigs being driven out of this stable, a pigsty.

We were 66 people left from a group of about 900.

These 66 were pushed into this pigsty.

The stench didn't bother us, our sense of smell had left us long ago.

The dirt is something we were used to.

And so we were forced into this dark, dirty hole.

The SS guards stayed at the entrance, with the dog, and with his arms.

And during the night, I realized this was the end of the road.

And I'm grateful to this day that my mental capacity was not completely gone.

So I could do some thinking, I had to make decisions, and I made one, I got up and stepped over people.

Some of them might've been already dead, to this entrance door, and passed by the SS guard, speaking to him in perfect German.

It wasn't easy to speak because I hadn't spoken for days.

So I brought out some words indicating that I would like to go to the bathroom or something of that sort, but in perfect German.

I knew that his shooting days were over.

And I knew with a certainty I had never experienced before that he would not kill me.

And at that moment of extreme faith, something told me, "Go ahead, you will be safe."

Fresh snow was on the ground on May 1st, 1945.

So I couldn't cover and I didn't bother to cover my tracks.

My exterior appearance was such that there was no way to hide who I was.

This pigsty was at the edge of a forest, and I walked into that forest, never turning around.

Three days later, I reached an inn.

The innkeeper, an Austrian, took me in.

And in the middle of the night, I was awakened by wild shooting.

I wasn't sure whether I had been awakened or whether I was still dreaming.

I was used to the sound of shooting and fighting.

So I listened for five or 10 minutes, and then I just assumed this was it, and went back to sleep.

Next morning, I found out the horrible truth.

After I had isolated myself from the group of 64, 2 hours later, the SS left.

They actually fled.

And these 64 people were left to themselves.

And townspeople later describe the scene to me, which was moving to them.

The 64 walked out of this messy place, clung together, were singing some songs, possibly of a religious nature, of their homelands.

There were people from all over Eastern Europe.

And marched together into their newly regained freedom.

And that night, when I heard the shooting, they had arrived at a big farm.

After knocking at the door, they saw that there were Ukrainian SS inside.

Who only had to see briefly, the striped uniforms and the shawl on heads.

All they did, mowed all of them down on the spot.

This was the shooting I had heard the night before.

I should have been one of them.

The experience was even more strange after I learned that of the 64, 62 went to this place where they were murdered.

And two others went in a different direction, and they had the same fate, they also were shot.

And I was the only one who survived.

- I started to realize that those of us that had survived, not only the Holocaust, but the harassment that we received from the mid 1930s on, for a period of 10 years.

The demeaning, the inhumane type treatment we got, unless today, we do document it, unless we discuss it, we tell people about it, we talk about it.

We are doing an injustice to future generations.

This is why I got involved.

This is why today, I feel that we must discuss it.

We must keep it in the open so that this could never happen again.

- Last year, I went to Europe.

To Belgium, France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Germany.

Primarily to visit my aging mother, who died last month at age 93.

But what we saw in terms of antisemitism was appalling.

In Czechoslovakia, I rented a car to go to Poland.

And when the man who was sort of trying to polish up my car before I was driving off went to a barn to get his rag to do so, the inside of the door was filled with inscriptions saying, "Shidduch, shidduch."

Shidduch is in Czech the pejorative term for Jew.

I wanted to ask him what this meant, but my brother-in-law who is 85 now, was 84 then, begged me not to say anything.

There are only three Jews in a town of 80,000.

He being one of the three, my mother who died was the other one.

My sister, who is still there, is the third one.

He didn't want any problems, obviously.

So we took off and we went to Poland.

In Poland, we went to the ghetto where we lived before deportation.

And on the spur of the moment, I told my sister, would she be interested in walking this last walk with me from the ghetto to the assembly place at the station.

And we did, and was very emotional experience.

On the way back, we passed the Trinity Church, a medieval, beautiful Roman Catholic church.

And we noticed that the apse side of the church, the backside of the church was covered with graffiti.

I photographed them by the way.

They were Mogen Davids, Stars of David, with (speaks foreign language) written underneath in white and red spray paint.

Now, this is very puzzling because in that particular town, there haven't been any Jews for 45 some years.

So you wonder what this means.

(chanting music) - [Speaker Man] This production is made possible by Major Grants from the Maine Humanities Council.

Additional support was provided by The Wing-Benjamin Trust, and a generous gift in memory of Mr and Mrs. Henry Greene, and Mr. And Mrs. Morris Kleven.

"Maine Survivors Remember the Holocaust" is a production of the Holocaust Human Rights Center of Maine.

(chanting music)