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For metres there were just ditches full of bodies, legs, heads. We were deported to Auschwitz four weeks later. We arrived in the early morning and they gave us a bed, a real shower, they cleaned us well with disinfectant and shaved us. After that they gave us striped uniforms and tattooed us. I was given the number on my left arm and from that point on I was a number, no longer a name. From there we were sent to Buna an Auschwitz sub camp and were set to work. After a few months there, I went for a walk one day and saw a few tomatoes growing. I still have the scars from it today.
I was taken to hospital and knew the rule: I was 20, about 1. When my limit in the hospital was up, they sent me to the gas chambers. There I met Dr Mengele, who asked me what was wrong. As I had trained as a tailor, he decided I had my uses there. It meant that being a tailor saved my life.
A complete fake of a man who I was too scared to look in the eye. One of the experiments he carried out on me was to take blood from my arm and inject it in my rear end. In we were sent on a death march from Birkenau to Oranienburg and from there to Buchenwald. Then to a quarry, where we were ordered to drill into the mountains to make some sort of secret city. From there we walked back to Buchenwald. Whoever was incapable of walking was shot. From there, big trains took us to Theresienstadt just as the Soviets were bombing the rails. We could sense that the Germans were almost destroyed.
For 17 days we had no water, no food, nothing. Despite the hardship I was doing OK compared to others. I still had the capability to clamber on to the cattle trains without help. We were liberated from the Russians at Theresienstadt on 9 May. I developed typhus and spent several weeks in hospital before I could go anywhere.
I decided to go back to my village as I had nowhere else to go. But of the 1, or so of us who had been deported, only eight to 10 had survived. She and her husband had been the only couple in Czemierniki to survive and then they went and murdered her when she came home. I had had parents, two brothers, three sisters, two nephews, two nieces, an aunt, an uncle, and all of them died. I found out the rest of my family were taken to Treblinka in When I finally returned to Czemierniki in , despite the years in which Jews had lived there I could not find a trace either of my family or of Jewish life.
Even the cemetery where my grandfather had been buried had been razed.
The synagogue was gone. I went to ask the local priest, who said they had taken the tombstones and crushed them for building materials or something like that. I believe they deliberately destroyed any sign of Jewish life so as to be rid of us for ever. The Jewish Federation brought me to America. I deliberately chose against going to Israel as it would have meant I would have had to fight and kill and the US seemed the next best choice.
They put me up in a hotel on 35th and 36th street until I got myself sorted out. I was desperate to get to work and make up for all those wasted years. Of the 1, Jews taken from my village, only three of us are still alive, one living in Israel, one in Baltimore and myself.
We stay in touch. I still drive my car, though not at night any more. I get jumpy when someone honks their horn, and occasionally I have bad dreams and wake up at night, my wife asking me: I have to go back to Auschwitz one last time. I feel like I own the place, having spent almost two years of my life there. I was not even two when we arrived at Auschwitz in I have no conscious memories of that time, but plenty of subconscious ones. My mother told me later how when they tattooed my arm with a needle, it was so painful that I passed out.
The number they gave me and that I still have was A I was probably the youngest child to have been tattooed who survived. Had we arrived just two days earlier, we would have been gassed immediately. Our transport was the first from which no one was taken to the gas chambers, probably because they knew by then that the Russians were very close.
We arrived on 2 November and on 30 October, 18, mothers and children who had arrived from Theresienstadt were killed. I can feel the burnt earth everywhere I walk. When Auschwitz was liberated in January , we were already extremely sick, so we had to stay there.
A Jewish paediatrician from Prague said my mother and her baby would not survive. She had rickets, TB and jaundice. But in April, against the odds, my mother gave birth to my sister, helped by prisoners who were doctors. My mother never talked very much about our time there, mainly to protect us and herself. She was 21 when we were finally able to leave, with a two-year-old and a six-week-old. She also took with us a four-year-old boy who was parentless and she spent months searching for his relatives, who she did finally track down.
At the same time, she had lost her husband and was mourning him. There was an unspoken ban on speaking about any of it. There was a frantic search to see who had survived and to look for relatives. But none of our relatives were still alive. Only much later could I recognise what a miracle it really was that I had survived, when I learned that of the thousands of Slovak men and women who were deported to Auschwitz, only a few hundred returned.
My mother put every effort into giving us a normal life. She sent us to school and made sure we studied. She was loving and resourceful. It was only later when she got old that she was gripped by depression. Having held everything together and been so capable and diligent for so long, she just fell apart as if under the burden of it all, and she died at the age of I later qualified as a psychotherapist, a job which I enjoy immensely, but which confronts me with the suffering caused by the Holocaust on a daily basis.
It does sometimes feel like a strange decision to live in Germany because the Holocaust is just so omnipresent here and there is a growing antisemitism that scares me, especially when you feel it in Germany, of all places, which is why I always repeat what Primo Levi wrote: It will be the last time many people return, the end of an epoch. The wounds might heal, but they leave scars which are still very visible. From the moment I arrived in Auschwitz with my mother and brother in May , the terror of it just invaded my whole being. My mother was immediately taken away and I later learned that she had been gassed.
I only recently discovered that my father had been there too. My whole world was turned upside down by the brutality of it. We had not in any way understood what had been going on, only later recognising all the sources and streams that led to the Holocaust. In my small Hungarian village, information had been very restricted. We were told by the authorities that we were being resettled, which is why I took my sewing machine with me.
I took my sewing machine! The process of losing any kind of hope was a very gradual one. We were transported in cattle wagons in which many babies and children suffocated, in what it turned out was the last transport of Hungarians. We had no water, no food, there was no hygiene. That diminished our hope and increased the feeling of being trapped. But despite that, you always retained a glimmer of hope. I had become aware of antisemitism from a young age, when my uncle had his head chopped in two when he was attacked by fascists while driving up to Novograd where he lived.
My family had a wood and coal business and, like most people in those days, my father was self-employed. As they started to restrict us, he lost his licence to operate and then he faced the enormous task of trying to find work. Meanwhile, my mother was at home trying to keep the family together, with all of us all involved in domestic life.
I recall the time in Auschwitz as single moments, short encounters, smells. We tried to distract ourselves from the reality of it by trying to recall our home lives in what turned into a game of momentary escapism. Quietly, the children would huddle together and ask each other: I vaguely recall the death march to Bergen-Belsen. I was so weak by then.
Our British liberators were amazing — they were heroes for me in the real sense of the word. After their long battle to reach Belsen, they had a campaign to organise a rescue mission. They brought little ambulances in and drove around picking us up. I was trembling and virtually lifeless, lying near the barracks, the stench of corpses everywhere, and unable to walk or lift myself up, when they arrived with a little ambulance. Even now I feel that sense at every meal time of how lucky I am, and I often say to those at the table: After our liberation I went to Sweden where we were looked after marvellously.
I am still touched by the memory of a doctor who taught me how to walk again, as through the malnutrition I was incapable. Such a simple thing, but he told me: It was amazing to be compared to someone having felt completely dehumanised for so long. After what happened, and having lost 50 members of my family, it was very important for me to have my own little family, to have again that sense of belonging. I really wanted to have children and was just 18 when I got married to a fellow Holocaust survivor from Transylvania.
I have had a good life. I try to tell them how small streams of hatred can quickly lead to unstoppable, horrific things, so they should stand up to any type of persecution or discrimination, whether bullying or malicious gossip. I did go back to my village, in But there was never any sense of any culpability and it seemed a futile exercise for me to try to find out who had betrayed us. Returning to Auschwitz is going to be a cold, painful and tearful experience. I would not go on my own.
We lived in a white-painted brick house on Kodur Street in Dej, which had a population of about 15,, around a quarter of whom were Jewish. I was the youngest of five, and we spoke Yiddish within the community and Hungarian and Romanian outside. We had a garden and backyard, full of plums, peaches, cherries and apples. My father was a merchant, a travelling salesman. My mother had the full-time job of keeping the house and family. I remember the lullaby she used to sing me, Schaefeleh, schluf mein tier kind Sleep well, my precious little child.
The synagogue or shul was the centre of communal life, and the centre of my life from three years upwards. We had no daily paper, no radio or phone, so the only news we got of the second world war was from newcomers to town. The change started at the end of , when people began expressing their anger towards us, especially the Hungarian neighbours.
The rabbi tried to convince us it was just some drunk, but as a year-old, I knew better. One day, four or five men came to our synagogue. They had escaped from Poland and came with stories we found impossible to believe — of Nazis rounding up Jews, looting their possessions, murdering them. People said the men were meshuggah crazy. The only impact these stories had on my family was the cache of extra potatoes and bread that I discovered stashed away in our basement.
But by , we started getting clearer signs. I stopped going to school.
The Fonz's big comeback! Meanwhile, my mother was at home trying to keep the family together, with all of us all involved in domestic life. I worry what will happen when I and others like me are no longer here to tell the story. We initially had no idea what had happened to the rest of the family and had no access to a phone. Eventually I discovered that of around people from my town who were deported, only about 10 survived, only two of whom were children — my sister and me. The safest place I could find to hide was in the yard near the bathrooms where all the dead bodies were brought and piled up … I would get on the pile, lie down next to the dead bodies and pretend I was one of them. It was taken over by the SS, so suddenly I found myself working for them.
My parents gave me a lantern to carry with me after dark. One day the Hungarian gendarmes came to our house and ransacked it.
In , the Nazis ordered all Jews living outside Budapest to be rounded up and placed in ghettoes. Then it was our turn and that was the day our misery truly began. In the spring of we were part of a contingent of 7, Jews who were corralled into a makeshift ghetto in the Bungur forest. We had to wear the yellow stars of David.
Kelley Wentworth plays an idol in Survivor: Cambodia Sue Hawk's infamous “ snakes and rats” speech from the season one finale has come to characterize the have come off the rose had Burnett not given the show a shot in the arm. “If It Smells Like A Rat, Give It Cheese” (season 16, episode 13). Definition of come out smelling like a rose in the Idioms Dictionary. come out smelling like a rose phrase. What does come out smelling like a rose expression .
That was the day when almost one-and-a-half centuries of Jewish life in Dej came to an end. In our forest ghetto I remember a local man, Mihai, who brought his cow to help us out with milk, having heard we were starving. He was arrested and beaten to a pulp and remained a paraplegic for the rest of his life. Two weeks into our ghetto life, we were sent to Auschwitz, miles north-west of Dej.
At this point my family was still together. My father and I were inspected by [Josef] Mengele, who was holding a baton, and went to the right. It was the last time I saw my mother and sisters alive.
Other Jews responsible for telling us the rules approached us and said: I saw some soldiers toss a baby up and shoot it in mid air for fun and from then on I had no doubt about what awaited us here. I worked out pretty quickly certain survival tricks. The scandal forced several board members to resign, but the chairman came out smelling like a rose. Please tell us where you read or heard it including the quote, if possible. Test Your Knowledge - and learn some interesting things along the way. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!
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