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If somebody would have asked me,

"Who are you?" when I was five or six years old,

I would probably say, "I am Czech."

I would never say to them, "I'm Jewish."

I was Czech.

Okay.

I believe my parents actually met in Prague

when my father was studying medicine in Prague.

They actually got married after he graduated

from the university in 1926.

Then they had my older brother who was born

in the spring of 1928.

John was born with a congenital problem;

his left leg was considerably weaker and

a little bit shorter so he had a limp.

I was born in September of 1932.

My dad, he delivered me in our home in [Olmos].

I was two years old when we moved to Prague.

I think there was more opportunity for

a bigger practice for my dad in Prague.

Life in Prague before the war in the 1930s was wonderful.

Prague was a big city, had a lot of cultural

things going on, there were a tremendous

amount of theatrical performances,

musical performances, art galleries.

It was a sophisticated city from a cultural standpoint.

Music was really important.

Shortly before the war...

We discovered jazz.

When I was about six, I think jazz was already

on my mind and part of my psyche.

My parents were both musicians.

They both played the piano extremely well.

I think their favorite was Chopin.

Then my brother started playing the piano

when he was about seven or eight years old.

He was an excellent pianist.

My dad, he had several hobbies

other than the music.

His primary hobby was photography.

He was very involved doing his own developing and printing.

I was always so amazed at his multiple talents.

I was focusing mostly on art, painting and drawing

from a very young age.

If I didn't do homework, I would be sketching or drawing.

I even remember going into my dad's office

when he wasn't there and taking insurance forms

off his desk to draw on.

I was playing the piano and the accordion at that time.

I always liked the accordion.

There was something about the sound of

an accordion, something melancholy,

something about the accordion that struck me as

being very personal and very human because of the sound.

It was my dad's accordion.

My dad seldom played it.

I would take his Hohner piano accordion

and try to play it.

It was bigger than I could really handle

when I was that young.

When I was roughly six years old,

I started first grade.

It was just an awful experience.

We had to sit in these wooden seats with this

old wooden desk in front of us.

There was no possibility of any kind of movement

or any kind of flexibility.

We had to sit with our hands behind our backs

when the teacher was talking.

We felt like prisoners.

I had this really achy feeling in my stomach

before I went to school every morning.

In elementary school, very often you were asked

what your belief was.

I went to my parents and I said,

"You know, they're asking us what your

religion was. What do I say?"

When it came my turn in the class to say

what my religious status was,

I would say, without a specific affiliation,

That doesn't necessarily mean I don't believe in God,

it just means I do not have

a specific religious affiliation.

My father pretty much strayed away from religion,

from organized religion.

If somebody would have asked me, "Who are you?"

when I was five or six years old,

"Where'd you come from? Who are you?"

I would probably look at them and say,

"I am Czech."

I would never say to them, "I'm Jewish."

I was Czech.

My mother was an example of the highest level

of ethics that I've ever experienced in a person.

She had a tremendous gift for having

non-compromising attitudes towards the whole

area of ethics and the ethical aspect

of relationships between people and

how you treat people and the respect that

you need to have for other people,

regardless of who they are

or where they are coming from.

I think there was something that was

embedded in her brain that made her such

an elegant person.

She made more of an impact on me from

that standpoint than my father did.

I mean, my father made an impact from

an intellectual and scientific standpoint,

and also from an inventive standpoint.

She never ridiculed a thought or an idea.

So as a kid, if I would say something

absolutely off the wall to her, she would

never say, "Well, that's crazy," or

"What made you say that?" or "That's ridiculous."

Nothing was ever ridiculous.

She would prompt me to say more and ask me

why I feel that way, but she would never

ridicule a statement of my feelings about anything.

Jewish religion never really surfaced.

It was very common among Jews living in

European societies in the large cities,

particularly in central Europe to have this

desire to be integrated into the society

and to fit into the society with very little focus

on their Jewish heritage.

We were more focusing on the ethics and

on the right behavior rather than focusing

on reading the Torah or following some historical beliefs.

My foot never entered the synagogue.

The Nazi troops came in the spring of 1939.

It was a great surprise.

My brother and I went to play.

We walked out of the apartment and

walked over to the river bank and

we saw this German soldier standing

next to this huge gun, a gun that had

two big wheels and a barrel about six feet long

with a sight at the end of the barrel and

metal seat at the end of that barrel.

We approached him, he smiled at us and

he picked me up and put me in the seat

behind the sight of the gun.

I had blond hair and blue eyes and

I looked like the stereotypical example

of the Aryan boy.

Then I sat there very proud and I admired

this awesome piece of equipment.

My brother and I knew that there was something

strange going on.

It was relatively submissive.

We were bombarded by this antisemitic propaganda

everywhere in the city; every store window,

every public library, every theatre,

many restaurants, some of the big department stores

had these signs: "Jews Not Allowed" in Czech and German.

We were kicked out of school because

we had a Jewish heritage.

I was almost relieved.

That was the beginning of the end of my education

for the next four years.

We all had to wear the Star of David

on our lapels, and they had to be exposed.

If they were concealed, you were usually stopped

by an SS man.

I was walking with my mother one day and

part of the star was concealed and

she was stopped by an SS person who

gave her a tongue-lashing and took some notes.

Two or three months later

we received an eviction notice

that we had to move out.

So basically we had to leave everything behind;

the baby grand piano, all the furniture,

all the carpeting, everything was left behind.

We packed our suitcases and left

and moved to a smaller apartment

on the other end of Prague across the city,

a dark, small apartment that we shared with

distant relatives of ours.

Our parents never spoke negatively about

what was going on.

There was never a negative word about...

or a complaint about the occupation.

There was never any visible anger against the occupiers.

When my mother and father spoke at the dinner table,

and they did want to discuss some things that

maybe were happening in Berlin or

were happening in Prague, they spoke in French.

So we never understood.

It was almost like they didn't want to share

any negative feelings or any sadness with us,

so it never came out.

The motto was "keep your chin up,

be proud of who you are and remember who you are,

have self-respect, have respect for your family,

have respect for yourself and

don't feel intimidated by anything or anybody."

There are times when that kind of distress

is not appropriate for a six-year-old.

It sends the wrong message and

I think they knew it and they just basically

kept it away from us, which in retrospect,

was the right thing because I did not

have this feeling of fear.

We were told that we need to assemble

at the President Wilson Railroad Station in Prague.

The railroad station was interesting because

we were assembled with thousands of other people.

There was no place to sit.

We were not allowed to go use the public restrooms

so we had these hundreds and hundreds of people

sitting all over the floor on the railroad station;

old, young, handicapped, some people were old

and incontinent, you would smell their excrement,

it was awful.

It was the first time that I really saw

people being treated worse than cattle.

From the main railroad station to Terezin,

we basically sat on bench-type seats

on this passenger train and got there

in about an hour or an hour and thirty minutes.

I feel like maybe this is when we

became prisoners, when we got on the train

and we no longer could walk the streets of Prague.

Terezin was really a prison...

A sophisticated, civilized way of

imprisoning people because we were

suddenly in a walled city, our parents were

living in different quarters from us,

my mother was separated from my father,

she was in women's quarters,

he was in men's quarters which were

old military barracks.

My dad got a job working at a clinic in Terezin,

my mother was working in a kitchen,

one of the big, like a military kitchen,

that cooked for thousands of people.

My brother and I were put up in a school

in what used to be a public school,

it was primarily a residence for boys

and I was with 10-year-olds,

my brother was with the 14-year-old kids.

For the children, life was really not that bad

in Terezin; food was minimal, but

I don't remember ever being really, really

hungry in Terezin.

I think the grownups had more trouble with

food than the kids did because obviously

they require more food than the children do.

The thing that bothered me about Terezin

was the fact that it was so, kind of regimented

and the fact that I was separated from my parents.

We had a leader who might have been

18 or 19 years old doing some very informal

education, studying some Hebrew history or

doing some basic math or some world history,

but it was mostly discussion.

Again, it was not done with books, notes

and any kind of a lesson plan that I can recall.

In my spare time, I would either go

and visit my parents late the afternoon

or I would sketch; I would draw and sketch.

There was very little music that I could do

that I was involved in, I didn't have

a musical instrument.

I remember being very interested in doing

some three-dimensional work or some sculpture.

I didn't have any clay and I didn't have

anything that I could manipulate three-dimensionally.

I remember getting hold of a red brick

because I thought I could take this red clay,

this brick, and somehow shape it into some form.

Of course I didn't have the tools to do it with,

didn't have any chisels or any hammer

or anything like that, so I pretty much

gave up on that and I pretty much concentrated on

sketching and drawing.

We had a pair of twins in the room, both my age,

one of them came in one day very upset,

almost crying, and saying that his grandmother

is in a coma and apparently she took

an overdose of sleeping pills.

When I asked him what triggered this crisis,

he told me that she was told that

she was going to be shipped to the east

on a transport.

That was the first time that I realized that

maybe this is not a permanent scenario

here in Theresienstadt.

Maybe this is just a place where we are going to be

for a while and possibly be shipped out of here.

Sure enough, that following December of 1943,

our family was asked to assemble at

the railroad station in Terezin with roughly

5,000 other prisoners.

We had no idea where we were going.

We had our suitcases and our personal belongings

and we assembled at the railroad station there,

we were put on these cattle cars that were

totally closed in with a couple of sliding doors,

one little tiny window, like a 12 x 8 window,

and a wooden floor, so basically cars that

were designed for transporting cattle.

The transport to Auschwitz was horrendously

serious in that we had between 80 and 100 people

in each wagon, pretty much jammed in.

What I remember was a bucket of drinking water

and a bucket for human waste,

so one bucket was used as a toilet

and one bucket was used for drinking water.

The train would stop periodically,

perhaps every 6 or 8 hours, for the steam engine

to pick up coal and water.

The doors of the wagons were pushed open and

a bunch of prisoners would pick up

the bucket of waste and dump it into the snow outside.

If we needed more water, we would pick up

fresh water and bring it into the car.

We traveled a little over two days

and we arrived approximately, I would say,

between 10:30 and midnight at this platform.

First we heard the doors of the other cars

being dragged open...

And then our door was open and we heard

men shouting, "Hier raus! Hier raus!",

"Get out, get out!" and dogs barking...

And I looked out and I saw a bunch of guards

walking around pulling these police dogs

by the leash.

Schnell! Schnell! Schnell!

It was a frightening experience because

first of all, it was the middle of the night,

kind of eerie, kind of a very dry, cold, black night

with this shouting guards and barking

of the dogs, and the rhythmic sound

of the steam engines still going like,

"Shh-shh, shh-shh, shh-shh, shh-shh ..."

And all of this happening under these

super bright spotlights...

That were shining onto the platform.

People were being told what to do.

All the luggage was dumped on a big pile

on the platform, huge...

With everybody just leaving their suitcases there

not knowing if they're ever going to

see them again, obviously.

Then we were put on trucks...

And transported through this barbed wire

into a closed-in camp.

We were immediately separated from my mother.

We also found out on the second day

that were in Auschwitz.

We had no idea what that meant,

what Auschwitz-Birkenau really meant.

It was a new name for us and we knew

we were in Poland, but that's about it.

We were in what was called the

"Czech Family Camp" that was composed of

whole families of people that came in;

mothers, children, fathers, even grandchildren...

my grandmother was there.

It was divided into a female segment and a male segment.

The female children were with their mothers

and the boys were with their fathers.

When I went to visit my mother,

I could just go and spend some time with her

and then go back to my barracks.

It was not a work camp, we were there

on a prolonged basis, not overnight or

not waiting for the gas chambers to emptied.

We only found out after the war that

there was this possibility of the

International Red Cross coming through

and that's why the Nazis basically

fabricated this artificial environment

by putting this family camp together

and to try to prove that Jewish families

are being kept together are living well

and are doing okay; and we have the grandchildren,

the children, the parents there and so forth.

It was ridiculous, but it worked for us, it made us

somewhat survive, so we were lucky in that respect.

We ended up in one of the men's barracks.

We also went through the showers.

They kept our hair reasonably short.

On our left arm, everybody had a number.

My number was 169057.

169,057.

That number stayed in my mind for

the rest of my life really because it was

like, embedded in my memory.

The next morning, we got some artificial coffee

and a small hunk of black pumpernickel bread

which was actually excellent bread,

but there was not enough of it.

Whenever I eat pumpernickel, it always

takes me back to the days in Auschwitz and

in spite of that, it's still my favorite type of bread.

We were really put on a starvation diet.

We got some soup at noon and a bowl of soup at night.

We were starving right from the word go.

I would say that we were probably living on

somewhere around 400 or 500 calories a day

which was unsustainable, it was almost

impossible to live on that amount of food,

particularly in the cold weather

that we were in at that point.

The barracks were all the same,

everything was identical.

That's basically, that's the way life in

Auschwitz was on a day to day basis.

Everybody wondering what's going to happen

the next day.

Found out through talking to people

that Auschwitz was truly an extermination camp.

We saw transports of people coming in and

just disappearing.

There were days when if the wind was blowing

the right way from the chimneys towards the

family camp, we were literally covered by human ashes.

We could smell and see and feel

these hundreds of pounds of human ash,

burning ash, that was coming in from

these black smokey chimneys.

When I mentioned this to my parents

and expressed my concerns and my knowledge

that this was an extermination camp,

that people are being killed in the gas chambers,

I basically was met with a silent answer.

I wasn't told, "Yes, you are right."

I wasn't told, "No, it's not true."

So I knew that this was what was going on.

I went to see my mother and found her

in one of the barracks.

After I left her and went down from the bunk

and walked to the front of her barrack,

is when I noticed that there was...

There were a couple of rooms at the end

of the barrack, the door had a window in it

and as I looked through the little window,

I saw this really attractive young woman.

She looked like she was painting a picture.

Of course with me, with my interest in art,

it caught my eye...

She kind of nudged me with finger and she said...

I said, "Come on in."

I asked him if he was hungry,

of course everybody was, and I had some bread

and stuff so I gave him some stuff.

The room was nice and warm.

She had a little pot-belly stove there

and she had a pot of coffee, I think, on the stove

and it smelled of burning wood and coffee.

She was smiling and she introduced herself.

She said, "My name is Dina.

I came from Theresienstadt also."

She told me she was from Prague.

We spent hours talking and became

really close friends.

Every time I went to see my mother,

I would go and see Dina.

Mengele, one of the chief doctors in Auschwitz,

found out that Dina was an artist and he wanted her

to document the physiognomy and the colors

of the eyes and the skin coloring of gypsies.

He wanted good visual records of these people.

He must have found them intriguing

in some medical or some scientific way

in order to preserve their looks

and their portraits.

I found out later during my tenure in Auschwitz

that all the gypsies were being pretty much killed

in the gas chambers.

We were told in March of 1944 that the

September transport that Dina came with

of roughly 5,000 is going to be shipped to Germany.

I guess I was really naive because

I kind of believed it.

After the war, I found out that all these people,

except for Dina and her mother and maybe

a handful of other people,

went into the gas chamber.

It was total destruction of those 5,000 people.

I had some really good friends in that group.

Was there ever anything that

you ever painted that was your choice?

In camp, no, and I admire the people who did.

There was, oh ja, there was Misha.

I did him in our camp after I finished

doing the gypsies and I was back

and I still had all the materials, the paints...

So I asked Misha if he would sit for me

and he did, and so I painted him.

Dina asked me if I minded if

she introduced me to her boyfriend, [Willie Brachman].

Apparently, he was the head of our camp.

Willie asked me whether I would like to be his messenger,

so I said, "Of course."

So I basically stuck pretty close to Willie

on a daily basis and it was running errands,

taking care of his clothing, even as far as making sure

his shoes are cleaned and just basically

being his assistant and his helper in every way.

When he walked in a camp,

I would usually walk by his side.

That kind of changed my whole status in the camp.

I immediately felt more under Willie's protection.

I was able to get some extra food

that I would share with my family

and better clothing, so it did improve my life

significantly in the family camp.

July 6th of 1944, it was the December transport

that had to go in front of Mengele

and his people, SS sidekicks.

The whole camp had to go through

a medical inspection because it was at that time

that the SS were looking for some of the

relatively young people that were able to work

and become either laborers in factories

or laborers in the reconstruction of Germany

because of the horrendous bombing that

was going on at that time.

Some people were being looked upon as possible slaves.

Some people at that point were of course,

looked upon as not being worth saving.

At that point, I had pretty strong confidence

that my father was somehow going to survive

because I knew that they were picking people

that were healthy and relatively young or middle aged.

I really wasn't concerned about my mother.

She was relatively healthy,

she was 39 years old at that point,

but I was concerned about my brother.

As we are going through this selection process

in front of Mengele, I am standing there with

maybe 100 or 200 kids or more of different ages.

I have my shirt off, I have just my trousers on,

and as I'm walking through, Mengele,

he points me to the left of his table.

on the right of me,

is a bunch of boys that he has accumulated.

I'm 12 and the oldest is 15 or 16.

So I end up in the group of fairly young kids,

some as young as 5 and 6 years old.

My brother, he was wearing a prosthesis and

was walking really well, but when Mengele saw him,

he could see that John was limping.

As soon as Mengele saw that, he directed him

to go on to the left side of the table

in the same group that I've ended up in.

At this point, I'm not in any kind of a state of panic.

We are standing there half naked and

there's a lot going on, a lot of people milling around

and lot of activity around us.

Suddenly, Willie Brachman comes out from the crowd,

walks up towards me very quickly and

grabs me by my shoulder and pushes me over

into this 14 and 15 year old group of boys

and disappears.

This whole scenario took about 8 seconds.

It was at that point that I realized that

everybody there that I just left

was on the death row and that

Willie just saved my life.

I was really concerned about my brother.

My brother was in danger, but my parents

would survive for sure.

I saw my mother about 10 minutes later and

she's saying goodbye to me because she knew

we were ready to leave the camp and

be moved to another location.

Obviously believing that I was going to survive.

I briefly said goodbye to my brother,

and I said goodbye to her.

She really was kind of the guiding light

in giving me the confidence, giving me the respect

that she gave everyone.

When things really started going badly,

whether it was later on in the prison camps

or even after the war,

I felt that regardless how serious or intimidating

a situation might have been,

I had enough self-respect and self-confidence

to somehow withstand that situation.

I think that's mainly due to her and to her upbringing.

February or March, Dina found out that

she was pregnant, and of course pregnancy

was a death sentence for a woman.

If anybody would have found out,

they would automatically kill her,

either in a gas chamber or they would just

take her separately and shoot her.

My father performed an abortion on her

and actually saved her life by doing that.

My dad never spoke about it, so it was

kept perfectly confidential.

In a way, it was very interesting the way

this circle developed with my father

actually saving her life through the abortion

and then Willie Brachman saving my life by

directing me and moving me into the

other group of older children.

I never saw Willie again.

Never, ever saw him again.

We walked out to the other camp location.

We were put on work duty

pushing these carts around that were

filled with clothing and shoes from

one warehouse to another warehouse.

We didn't quite understand the procedure,

why we were doing it or what the system was,

but we basically did what we were told to do.

It was several weeks.

I found out that my dad was in F Lager

which was another segment of the camp,

closer to the crematorium and to the gas chambers.

Somehow I got permission from somebody

to go and see my father and I saw him

in the F Lager, just once...

And he was totally a nervous wreck.

I've never seen him as depressed and

looking as devastated as he was at that point.

He simply could not hide it.

It was at the moment that I,

and he was crying...

and so I knew, I began to think that maybe

there is some bad news about my mother.

Her name and the subject of her and my brother

never came up.

We just never spoke about it.

I was afraid to ask and he was afraid

to tell me basically.

We struggled through this period till December of 1944.

I had another chance to walk outside

my particular camp area.

I was able to get out of the gate and

walk through a corridor, and I saw a couple of

women in another camp that I remembered

from the family camp, and I knew that these women

knew my mother.

They waved to me and I waved to them and

I am shouting in Czech to them, "Where is my mother?"

because at this point, I have no clue.

"Where is my mother?"

"Do you know where my mother is?"

"Have you seen my mother?"

They look at me and they looked away

and just keep on walking.

That was a bad sign.

It was not till really after the war

that I found out that my mother volunteered

to stay with my brother; that when she

learned that he basically was doomed

and would killed, then she decided that

one of the parents needs to stay with him

and that she's going to be the one

that's going to stay with him,

being almost sure that I will survive and

that my father will survive.

There is a letter that was smuggled out from

the family camp that was written by my mother

and given to a guard and given to my father.

She basically knew what they were heading for.

He got the letter the next day or the day after

they were killed.

Here is the note.

I never saw this letter.

He did mention to me that he got a letter

from my mother just before her death,

but he never showed it to me.

I never really asked him if I could see it.

She was totally invulnerable and uncompromising.

When it came to her beliefs about

treating people fairly regardless who they were

or what economic level they were in,

or what educational status.

There was nothing about her that would

ever segregate people in any way.

I recollect some plain simple statements

that she would make to me and to my brother

about treating people the way you want to be treated.

Always treat people with the utmost of respect.

She treated us that way, too.

She was just a definition of a saint,

so that's her part of the story.

D Lager is right next to the barbed wire

where the main walkway is to the railroad station.

So I'm getting ready to see my father walking

in this large group of prisoners out of the F Lager

and I was able to get a pair of boots,

I knew what his size was,

and I was able to get an overcoat,

and I got one package of cigarettes because

everybody wanted cigarettes,

everybody wanted cigarettes.

I had this ready next to this barbed wire

which is maybe like 5 feet away from me,

then suddenly I see hundreds...

Hundreds of prisoners walking,

maybe 50 to a group,

and after maybe about 5 or 10 minutes, I see my father.

I'm waving to him and I take the overcoat

and I throw it over the barbed wire.

He gets the overcoat and carries it,

I pick up one of the boots and throw it over

and he gets the boot, and I pick up the other boot

and I throw it over and it gets caught on top of the wire.

Incredibly frustrating scenario for me.

So then I try to pick up the cigarettes

and the cigarettes are gone...

Somebody took the cigarettes.

I'm shouting, "Goodbye, we shall see each other."

That was like half wishful,

half emotional kind of greeting.

He was waving to me and saying, "Goodbye,"

and that was it.

Then we are told that we are being moved out.

It was extremely cold, dry cold,

crispy weather with snow,

could have dropped down to 10 or 15 below zero.

My feet were absolutely freezing.

This is spite of the fact that I had leather shoes

and we were walking, I mean I was in motion.

My feet were absolutely freezing...

I didn't have any socks and somebody had the idea

that I should wrap my feet in the newspaper

and then put them in the shoes.

I did that and it was perfect.

I was perfectly warm.

It's just wonderful to be able to improvise

like that and I was wonderful.

I had the newspaper in my shoes for

the next 3 or 4 days.

We are walking in a group of prisoners.

There were no trains available going in the direction

that we were going...

We were going towards the town of Gleiwitz.

We continued the following day and

I was getting dehydrated and really tired,

and really losing it mentally at that point.

Basically I said, "I can't walk anymore,"

and they said, "Yes, you can and you're going to walk."

They took me by my arms and forced me to walk.

We are walking probably close to 2 days,

maybe till 9 or 10:00 at night.

I was really getting weak after several hours of walking.

In the snow in the ditch,

we see dead bodies...

These people must have been shot a hour before

or two hours before because

I didn't hear any shots.

Apparently these people just couldn't walk anymore,

so they basically were shot in the head

and thrown in the ditch.

Seeing this just absolutely scared the heck out of me.

We slept in a barn, get up early in the morning,

and kept on walking.

I realized that I am kind of fading in and out mentally.

I'm going through this little town in Poland

and I'm reading these signs on the shop windows

in Czech, I'm transposing them into Czech.

I'm in Poland, so I'm kind of drifting in and out...

Basically, I'm dreaming that I'm home in Prague and...

When we eventually got to Gleiwitz,

we were put on these open coal cars.

The Germans really ran out of trains.

They were using their regular trains

to transport troops and they really didn't

have anything to transport us in

except for these coal cars.

We went from Gleiwitz to a northern part of

Czechoslovakia, through a town called

As soon as the train stopped,

we encountered these Czech women that saw us,

we must have looked miserable and hungry

and they started throwing food into the cars,

whatever they had in their hands.

They might have come from the market

so we might have ended up with

two pounds of sugar, flour, a bag of spaghetti

that we couldn't cook, apples, lemons...

And then the train started going.

We went through the Czech Republic into

some small town in Austria where the train would stop,

able to get off the train for a while,

stretch our legs, relieve our bladders,

and somebody picked up a bunch of snow

and brought the snow into the car.

Somebody had some sugar that was thrown

into the car, and some lemons,

so they made lemon ice.

We all, maybe 15 or 20 of us, eating this lemon ice.

Ever since then, lemon ice is one of my favorites.

It was a great experience, that was.

The next day we found out that we were

in the town of Mauthausen.

We got out of the train and we walked

up a steep hill and then up several hundred stairs.

Most of us didn't think we were going to

make it up those stairs.

We were basically weak and stiff by

being on the train for two days, and hungry.

It took us a lot of effort to get up those Mauthausen stairs.

We stood outside for maybe two hours,

late in the evening, we are waiting to

get into the showers.

I'm standing in a group of prisoners.

Some prisoner comes to us,

that's been there for a while,

and whispers something and the guy next to me

starts crying and goes into a state of panic.

I'm trying to figure out what's going on here,

"What's this guy whispering about?"

"Why is my friend going crazy?"

Apparently what he whispered to him was,

"You need to give us your shoes because

you're all going to be gassed, anyway."

We kept our shoes on and we went into the showers.

They were real showers, they were not gas chambers.

We got out of the showers and we were issued

new uniforms, striped uniforms.

Mauthausen was an extremely difficult camp to survive

if you ended up working in a stone quarry.

The living conditions were just unbelievably bad.

To die in Mauthausen either from hunger,

from disease, or a combination of the two,

or from hard work and working in a quarry,

or the combination of the three.

I would say 70% of the people around me had Typhoid Fever.

They would get diarrhea, they would get high fever,

they would basically dehydrate and then die.

People just dying left and right around us in Mauthausen.

Typhoid Fever was transmitted by lice

and everybody had lice in Mauthausen.

We were in Mauthausen for several weeks.

What I saw every day in Mauthausen just angered me.

I was angry with the prisoners there,

I couldn't be angry at the SS because

they were not approachable.

I couldn't reach them in any way,

but I see this group of famished, disabled,

sick people and subconsciously I didn't want them

to be that way, so I'm angry with them.

I'm thinking, "Get out of this bed. Do something,"

you know, "Get some water and try to help yourself,"

and yet I'm bringing water to some of them,

I'm trying to save some of them,

but this is overwhelming.

My anger is driven by frustration, by fear,

driven by the fact that I don't know

where the end is going to be or

when it's going to be, if there is going to be an end,

and I see this group of people that's

totally being destroyed physically and psychologically

and I don't want them to be that way.

So somehow I am subconsciously,

or consciously angry with them.

It would be with someone that you see

that's dying, but you don't want them to die.

So that doing something that is

totally against your will.

Mauthausen had a lot of subcamps,

as many as 30 or 40 subcamps.

After being in Mauthausen for a few weeks,

we were moved to another camp called Melk.

We were there for a few weeks and

we were peeling potatoes and doing some kitchen duty.

Once in a while I would eat a raw potato because

we were pretty hungry.

The concentration camp was on a hill and

below us was the monastery, it was huge

and very gilded and very, very rich-looking

kind of a structure.

We could see the people walking around,

moving around, going to work on a bicycle.

With envy, we were kind of looking out

and seeing these people moving around and

going about their daily tasks.

That was Melk.

A bomb came down and just missed the railroad.

It was really uncomfortably close to the camp.

Apparently went into the river which was

probably good because it would have exploded.

I remember clearly seeing this allied fighter

just coming from the sky suddenly and just

shooting with its machine gun onto the top of

this guard tower and I saw this guard just

feverishly running down the ladder

and then hiding below.

From the South Lager, we go in through

another march and this time,

we are probably walking about 22 miles or more

and we are just a bunch of ragged, famished corpses.

We are going through a little Austrian village

and there must have been several hundred of us,

and there is a water fountain in the main square.

The prisoner wants to have a drink of water

and the locals would not let him

drink from that water fountain.

I can imagine what we looked like and

I guess they didn't want us to pollute

their water fountain.

We kept on walking and we ended up in a

fenced-off area in the middle of the woods,

which we later found out was near

the village of Gunskirchen.

We go through this gated barbed wire area

into the Gunskirchen camp.

The first day, we got a small piece of bread

and a bowl of soup in the morning and that was it,

that was the ration for the day.

I get a piece of bread and it was mostly mold.

Basically, I just picked it up and just

kind of deteriorated and went into the air,

kind of fluffed up and turned into smoke.

In Gunskirchen, we are among 12 or 14,000 prisoners

and there was no running water in the camp,

there were no toilets to speak of.

We are looking for a place to stay, to sleep,

but there are some huts there and

we walk into one of those huts and

there is a dirt floor there and we had a bunch of

prisoners sitting all around the dirt floor, very crowded.

Every half an hour, or every hour,

there is this body that comes across us,

a dead body like a large piece of wood,

and several prisoners just take it and

move it across the space and across everybody else

to get it out of the hut.

We can't sleep this way, so we went out

and we slept outside in the woods,

three or four of us, we made a tent out of branches

and a couple of blankets and we actually

positioned those branches in such a way that

we could drape the blankets over the branches

and we slept under that outside.

It is May 1945, there is no ration, no bread, no nothing.

We are really getting weak.

It was probably one of the first times that

I truly felt that I was not going to make it.

You kind of talk to yourself and then

you answer yourself and you're having a conversation.

I'm sitting there on the ground and kind of

thinking about, "This could be it."

All during this time, the only thing that

really made me survive mentally, is fantasizing.

Fantasizing about being home sitting around

a dining room table, having dinner with my parents.

I'm fantasizing about having roast beef

and mashed potatoes.

I'm fantasizing about this, I'm fantasizing about that,

I'm totally transporting my mind into

a totally different scenario from what I'm in right now.

You can fantasize as much as you want,

but you know, you're getting pretty weak,

this is getting pretty serious and you may not make it.

You better just face reality.

We wake up early in the morning and

I hear small arms fire and machine gunfire

and I'm thinking right away,

"Well, they are shooting the prisoners."

"It's got to be, it's so close now."

"It's so immediate."

"The proximity is so loud,

they'll start shooting us."

Then the fire stops and about 15 or 20 minutes later,

this is now fairly early in the morning,

maybe 7:00 in the morning,

I look up and I see three or four of the guards

standing in a huddle holding up a white sheet.

I'm just trying to put two and two together

because I'm half out of it and half in it...

Within two minutes after that,

I see the first GI walk into the camps,

close enough so I can see him,

but at this point I knew it was over...

That for me, the war was over.

The stench was just absolutely unbelievable.

It was a mixture of rotting flesh, feces,

just everything, it was, the stench was unbelievable.

They told us that they're fed water

and soup once a day and once slice of bread

and that's it; they're crammed into six barracks

and many suffocated.

There was one latrine trench and if you got

dysentery and didn't make it to the latrine trench,

you would be shot.

It's a kind of a turmoil;

nobody quite knows what to do.

We had no special training in

handling this; we had no idea we were going to

free a concentration camp.

We gave them our sea rations, cigarettes,

whatever we had...

Many of them got on their knees and were crying.

They kissed our feet and our shoes,

the bottoms of our trousers.

I see a bunch of people rushing

towards this little wooden hut.

I see them eating something,

so I'm walking over there, not running,

I was not really capable of running,

and I see these guys jumping down on

this pile of red beets and I go in there and

I try to grab one of these beets and

somebody tries to grab it out of my hand,

and I get into a big pushing pulling contest

with this guy, and I finally get

one of these red beets.

Also at that time, we saw something

going across the road and there seemed to be

a little muddy or plate-type surface,

and we thought they were eating some of that

and some of them were digging for the roots

there at the trees and eating some of the roots

or bark off of the trees.

So [Marvin] and I went into the camp and

we saw all these dead bodies out

throughout the trees.

We thought they were dead until one or two

would open their eyes or else raise a finger.

Shortly after that, the American army

takes us down to the main road

and tries to walk us in a large, you know,

caravan, a large group of prisoners

to the nearest town, wherever that was,

and they realized we couldn't walk.

Many of them died along the roadway there.

So they put us on army trucks

into the town of Wels, Austria.

We end up in a small little suburb called Pershing.

They put us into a little public school there.

They gave us some food and civilian clothing.

Afterward we would take showers.

I walked into the bathroom and I looked in the mirror

and I didn't recognize the person I saw.

I mean, I was looking at a skeleton.

I was just absolutely shocked.

It's just like, "Who is this person?"

We got on the army kitchen diet fairly quickly.

We were able to recover our strength reasonably

within two or three weeks where we could walk pretty well.

Our major problem was trying to

figure out how to get home.

Three of the boys decided they were going to

jump a train and go to Czechoslovakia.

We said to them, "You're not going to make it.

You got to be kidding," but they made it,

and the way I found out that they made it

was because my dad who was already in Prague,

got out of the concentration camp sooner than I did,

so he was already in Prague and looking for me.

Someone apparently told him that some kids

from the Czech Republic ended up in a hospital

in Prague and he went and talked to them

to see if they know where I am.

They said, "Yes, we are the ones that

were with him in this school in Pershing

and that's where he is. The last time

we saw him was a week ago."

Well, my dad spoke good English and

became very friendly with a bunch of the officers

in the American army.

He did actually do some work for the American army

in Germany for about two or three weeks.

They had a car that they confiscated from the Nazis,

it was an old Opel.

They said to him, "If you want to go to Prague,

you can have one of our cars."

So he took this car and drove to Pershing

the next day.

We had this family signal, whistle...

It was like (whistles), well, it was our whistle.

We used that in the woods if we were fishing

or if we were mushroom hunting or whatever.

We never shouted in the woods,

we always used that whistle.

We felt that was less intrusive than

be hollering in the woods and scaring

all the animals.

It was around noon time that I was in this room

in this school in Pershing when suddenly

I hear this (whistle)...

And I knew immediately that's who it was.

Well, he came into the room and we had a great reunion.

The same day, we got in the Opel and drove

back to Prague.

We then stayed with our friend that used to

work for my grandparents; the woman that

took care of all of photographs and

all of our personal things during the war.

When I started Junior High, I had a conflict

with one of the students, one of the young boys

in my class; I had a chair that I was going to use

and he said, "That's my chair."

So we got into this argument about

who had the rights to this chair.

It got so heated that he said to me,

"You damn Jew. It's too bad that Hitler

didn't kill all of you."

I don't know how he came to the conclusion

that I was Jewish, maybe my name.

I picked up the chair, and I probably would have

hurt him really badly, except somebody got

between us and stopped us.

Then in the spring of the following year,

we were able to move back into the apartment.

My dad resumed his medical practice.

My dad resumed friendship with a woman

that was divorced with two children.

When the Communist Government took over

the country in 1948, my dad's future wife

told him that she would not be willing to

common live in Prague under the Communist Regime.

It was then that he began to plan to escape

from Czechoslovakia.

Luckily, we met a man who worked at

the Ministry of the Interior in Prague

while we were fishing.

After my dad really got to know him well,

the man, he was willing and able to issue

a false passport for my dad and for me

for a small sum of money.

We took this false passport and got an

Italian Visa and and Austrian Visa on the pretense that

we were going to go to Italy on vacation.

We did depart middle of October 1949.

We just packed our suitcases and basically

got on the train.

At this point, I was 17 years old and

you cannot be on the passport unless you are

under the age of 13, so when we got on the

Pullman car in Prague heading for Vienna

and then Rome, Italy, I immediately crawled up

onto the top bunk, took my shoes off,

took my trousers off and covered myself

with a blanket so you could only see

maybe about this much of my head.

When the guard walked in, he really had

absolutely no idea what I looked like.

He asked my dad, "Is that your wife up there?"

And my father said, "No, that's my son,

he's right here on the passport."

So I was listed as a 12 year old rather than

a 17 year old on the passport.

Spent three or four weeks in Austria,

in Salzburg, immigration papers took about

three or four weeks and we finally got

a plane from Munich, Germany and flew to London.

We were in London for almost two years

till the spring of 1951.

My dad worked in a hospital in London

for very little pay, and because there was

very little opportunity for foreign doctors

in England at that time, we decided to

immigrate to the United States.

I finished high school at Forest Hills,

my dad passed his New York State Board and

started practicing medicine in Forest Hills.

I ran into some uncomfortable scenarios

at Jones Beach in New York.

I saw people constantly looking at my number

on my left arm and asking me what that was.

I just didn't want to be reminded of the number

at the point of my life and I told my dad

about it and he said,

"Well, do you want to have it removed?"

I said, "Yeah. I don't want to be carrying

this number on me for the rest of my life."

So he had a friend who was a surgeon,

you know, gave me a local and took the skin off,

and I have a big five inch scar there,

but I don't have a tattoo.

I had difficulty after the war,

following the educational dogma in junior high

and high school; didn't have the elementary education

that I needed to be in high school because

I missed second grade, third grade,

fourth grade, and fifth grade,

so when I came back, I didn't have the

elementary education.

My attitude was that most of the stuff

that was being taught had absolutely nothing

to do with life.

I think that made me always a little bit of a rebel.

My attitude was never the best when

I was in school and I questioned everything

and I ridiculed almost everything that

was being taught.

Except for art!

Art for me was the greatest escape.

I ended up doing projects for other kids,

they would be coming to my apartment and

we would spend the afternoon sketching

and drawing and I would give them basically

drawing lessons and they would go home with

their art projects completed.

After the war, I really hit that big Hohner accordion

and I started playing almost totally jazz.

It kept me away from the piano.

I hated this idea of reading music

and following a script, and I felt much

freer just picking up the accordion and

playing it by ear.

I eventually studied Industrial Design

at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and

graduated with a degree in Design and

started working for General Electric

in the fall of 1956.

I've worked for several other large companies

in product design and product development.

Met my wife, Barbara, in 1958 in Connecticut

where I was working for GE.

We were married in 1960 and had two boys;

one born in 1963 and one born a little over

a year later.

I love to do my sculpture and my artwork

and we love babysitting for our grandchildren.

This letter, this little note here,

written on this brown paper,

my dad apparently carried that with him

when he was in the F Lager in Auschwitz

and then he carried it with him through

a couple of the camps in Germany that he was in.

Then he brought it home and I never saw this letter.

The day he died in 1967, I actually found this

note in the bedroom; I've had it ever since.

The first few years, I really didn't even

want to look at it, it was just too painful

to even read and so I kept it in one of my drawers

and it's only been the last few years that

I've really been able to comfortably read it.

Here is the actual note that my mother wrote:

She opens up with the sentence,

"My dearest and my best," and then she continues,

"We are now waiting for the darkness.

We went to see Willie and he didn't leave us

with any doubt as to what is going to happen.

At first we considered to hide, but

we dropped that idea because we felt that

it would have not been successful.

The famous trucks are already here and

we are waiting for it to start.

I have taken five bromides and those

made me tired, but I am not excited or upset.

Also, my wonderful and dearest,

don't feel guilty or responsible for what happened.

This was our destiny.

We did what we could do.

Remain healthy, and remember my words

that time will heal everything.

At least it will heal most of it.

Remember my dear golden boy and give him

all the love that you can.

Think about Walter and remember

what we used to say, that we are just

following him and he cleared the way for us.

I will be thinking about you and my son.

Have a great life.

It's time to get on the trucks.

Into eternity, your Vilma.

How often do I feel about those four years?

Every day, maybe 15 times a day,

sometimes 30 times a day,

sometimes 8 times a day.

Every third or fourth situation triggers

a memory that goes back 65 years.

Eating a piece of bread, dark bread triggers it.

Eating soup triggers it.

Putting on a pair of shoes in the winter triggers it.

Everything triggers it.

Picking up my grandchild triggers it.

Knowing that so many kids that age,

four years old, five years old, six years old,

were killed, that looked just like that.

That were just as smart, many of them that were

just a beautiful as that.

Everything that's really sweet can become sour

because it triggers that sour reflection,

so from that standpoint, it's very frustrating.

You almost want to take a pill that

takes you away from that bittersweet reflex.

If there was a pill that could block this

bittersweet or sweet bitter reflex,

that would just let you enjoy today

what you are enjoying, that would be

absolutely fabulous because my life would be,

it would be heaven.

The note is dated Tuesday, July 11th, 1944.