Birkenau was part of Auschwitz. Birkenau was where all the killing was being done. They opened the gate — it was still nighttime — and they yelled at us to leave all our belongings where they were and not to pick anything up. Women and children to the right, men to the left. I was holding onto my sister Goldie and my little brother Tulie, and we were simply being torn apart from one another, never to see each other again. My sister and my little brother were directed immediately to the gas chambers. When we came to the barrack, the Stubendienst — the man in charge of the barrack — walked out. He was a Polish inmate, and he said: “Ha! You Hungarian Jews, you think you’re here on vacation? Think again. You see those chimneys? Those ashes that are flying? Those are your mothers, your fathers, your brothers, and your sisters. And if you don’t behave and do exactly what you’re told, this is how you’re going to wind up: ashes.”
I couldn’t believe it. You mean my sister, my little brother — ashes? This is the twentieth century. How is it possible?
I had a good life at home. We were a family of seven. We went to school — Jewish school, Yeshiva, and other institutions. Most of the day, we studied. Seven days a week, that’s what we did. My father had a wonderful chocolate factory. He was the first in our region to make chocolate-covered wafers, similar to KitKats, only shaped like little animals and wrapped in tin foil. Every evening he would come home from work and the children would search his pockets — he always made sure he had some tucked away for us. He also ran a wine and syrup manufacturing business.
Both of those businesses were taken from us immediately. Right from the very beginning, things began to change. School stopped — they would not allow us to attend. On the fifth day of the occupation of the city of Karchau, a truck pulled up to our gate. We lived in a three-story building, and they began banging. The building superintendent came running out. All they wanted to know was where the Jewish residents lived, and he was quick to point them in our direction. He showed them our apartment.
There was another young couple on the other side of the building — Jewish as well, a husband and wife with two daughters. The mother had given birth to an infant boy just two months earlier. They came breaking down doors and striking everyone. We were in bed at five in the morning.
They were carrying open sacks and screaming at us to throw in all our valuables — money, gold, jewelry. Whatever they could find, they took. They were striking my father, demanding he open the safe. And while he was doing so, we heard terrible screaming from our neighbor’s apartment. My sister Lola and I slipped through the back door into the kitchen and made our way into their unit. What we saw has never left me.
One of the soldiers was holding the infant by its legs and swinging it, demanding that the parents make the child stop crying. The parents were begging and the daughters were weeping: “Our baby! Don’t hurt the baby!” With a smirk on his face — you could see he was taking pleasure in what he was doing — he slammed the baby’s head into the doorpost, ending the child’s life instantly. It is a memory that will not leave me. I still have nightmares. I still see that screaming infant and then that sudden, horrifying silence.
My father had been preparing to take the family into the Karchau ghetto — over two hundred of us altogether. While he was packing, a young man named Michael came by and said to him: “Mr. Lesser, you know how I feel about your daughter Lola. Someday I’d love to marry her. We come from the same community — do me a favor.” My father offered him a choice: come into the Karchau ghetto, or go to a smaller community called Niepoolomice. He chose Niepoolomice. That was miracle number one, because all the people who entered the ghetto were later transported to Belzec — an extermination camp — and not one of them survived.
We lived in a farmhouse, with the farmer on one side and our family on the other. My father became a small-scale baker to feed us, and it turned into something meaningful. He began baking for the wider community as well. There was a baking oven inside the house, and I worked alongside him. I was twelve years old at the time. Life continued like this for about a year, and then my sister Lola married Michael. After they wed, they moved into a duplex — one side for them, the other for the owner, who happened to be the mayor of that community.
One day the mayor returned home and told them: “Michael, Lola, save yourselves. We have heard a rumor — there is going to be a raid against the Jewish people, either tonight or tomorrow.” So Michael arranged for a wagon and driver, and we slipped away in the middle of the night. We departed, and that was miracle number two — because that very night, after we left, soldiers went from house to house, rounded up every Jewish person they could find, loaded them onto trucks, and drove them into the forest. The men were handed shovels, forced to dig a trench, and then everyone was shot. Thousands of people, gone in a single night.
We were fortunate to have escaped, but the only place we could go was a city called Bochnia, which had a ghetto of its own — and a very dark reputation. Every so often, dump trucks would roll into the ghetto in the middle of the night, and soldiers would tear children from their beds and throw them into those trucks. You can imagine the screaming — parents crying out for their children, children crying out for their parents. When the trucks were full, they began moving toward the exit. Parents ran behind them in desperation. These soldiers had machine guns mounted at the rear of each truck, and they fired on the parents chasing after their own children. Word of these atrocities spread throughout Europe: stay away from the Bochnia Ghetto. But we had no choice.
One day, a sympathetic Jewish policeman warned my brother-in-law Michael: “There’s going to be a raid tonight. Save yourselves.”
Ever since those trucks had come into the ghetto, every household had constructed a hiding place — they called them bunkers. Our bunker turned out to be a large, ornate piece of furniture used for hanging coats and jackets. If you opened the door and pushed the clothing aside, the back panel would slide open. Behind it was a hole in the wall with enough space for twelve of us to crawl through and stand between two buildings. The last person would slide the panel closed, arrange the clothing back in place, and shut the door. We stood there in the dark. It was winter. It was snowing. The buildings were connected on the outside, but the ceiling above us was open to the sky.
All through the night we heard gunfire, dogs barking, and screaming unlike anything I had ever heard before or since. Toward morning, it grew quiet. We dared to emerge.
What we found is almost impossible to describe. People were lying in the snow, some partially mauled by dogs, some still barely alive. Blood was everywhere. Workers moved through with pushcarts, collecting bodies and remains and loading them up. They were carried to the ghetto square and stacked as high as they could go. And then soldiers arrived with canisters of gasoline, poured it over the pile, and set it alight — a massive, unspeakable bonfire in the middle of the ghetto. Do I need to tell you what that was like? The smell? My God. That was true hell on earth.
We had known our sister was hiding in a doghouse — and yes, you heard that correctly. You lifted the floor panel, descended a small ladder, and there was room for seven people with food and bedding stored below. I went to check on her. She was not there. But everyone else who had been hiding in that spot was lying in the snow outside, each with a bullet wound. All seven had been pulled out and executed.
My sister Lola and her husband had been saved by the same Jewish policeman who had warned Michael. He had moved them to a different hiding place — a leather tannery. Inside a water tank, they stood knee-deep in freezing water throughout the entire night. They heard the same sounds we did — the gunfire, the dogs, the screaming — but no one checked the tank, and they survived.
I eventually fled Poland hidden inside a double-decker truck. Ten people lay on their sides in the space between the cargo and the chassis. We were taken to the border and managed to cross, then made our way through Czechoslovakia into Hungary — still a free country at that point. We arrived in the summer of 1943.
In March of 1944, the Nazis marched into Hungary. Within two months, they were already loading trainloads of people and sending them to the death camps. They told us: “Germany needs workers. You will be relocated. Bring whatever valuables you can carry and leave everything else behind. Anyone found hiding will be dealt with.” They loaded eighty people into a single cattle car. My sister, my little brother, and I were among them.
Inside the car there were two buckets of water. Within the first day, the water was gone. There were no sanitary facilities of any kind. After two days, the buckets had filled with human waste and were overflowing. We had bundles that allowed us to sit above the floor, which was a mercy. Three days and three nights. When we arrived, the sign on the station read Oświęcim in Polish — Auschwitz.
But we didn’t stop at Auschwitz itself. The train continued for another three kilometers and came to a halt at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The gates opened. It was still dark. And that is where the story I told you at the beginning unfolded — women and children to the right, men to the left — and I was separated from my sister Goldie and my little brother Tulie forever.
I was fifteen and a half years old. Not quite a child, not quite an adult. I chose to go with my uncle and my cousin rather than with the younger children, reasoning that this must be a labor camp — that they would feed you better if they believed you could work. That decision saved my life. Had I gone with the children, I would have been sent to the gas chambers as well.
Moving through the selection line, I watched a doctor directing people with a flick of his finger — right, left, right, left. That was Dr. Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death.” He determined who would live and who would die with a gesture. I watched him ask a young man ahead of me whether he could run five kilometers or would prefer to travel by truck. The young man said he had a bad knee and would rather take the truck. He was directed to the right. He did not understand what that meant. No one did.
I turned to my uncle and cousin and said: “Let me go first.” I spoke German. I stepped forward, drew myself up as tall as I could, gave a sharp salute, and said: “I am eighteen years old. I am healthy, and I can work.” He asked if I could run five kilometers. I said yes. He sent me to the left. My uncle followed. My cousin followed. We had passed.
In the bathing area, we were told to remove all our clothing and shoes. My uncle had given me diamonds concealed inside my shoes, and his son carried the same. The others removed theirs as ordered — but I refused. I walked through the entire processing area completely undressed, wearing only those shoes. Guards moved back and forth inspecting us. Not one of them said a word. I was sent into the bathhouse still wearing them. Had anyone noticed, I would have been executed on the spot for disobeying a direct order. But no one did.
After five weeks at Birkenau, we were transferred to Dürrhof, a rock quarry. When the mountain was dynamited, it was our job to break the boulders with sledgehammers into pieces small enough to handle, load them into mining cars, push them down to the grinding machines, and then push the empty cars back. It was brutal, exhausting labor. I could see that my uncle would not survive that kind of work for long. So I used one of the diamonds to bribe the kitchen supervisor to give my uncle a position inside the kitchen. He took the payment and kept his word. It made things more manageable for my uncle.
Every evening when we returned from work, we were required to line up to be counted — including the kitchen workers. We stood in rows of five while the guards counted, and counted again, and counted again. Normally they would finish and send us to collect our rations. But this evening, they kept counting. The commandant came down with his companion and announced that he was going to teach us a lesson we would never forget. Three inmates had escaped. As punishment, he ordered his men to pull out every tenth person in line to receive twenty-five lashes.
As I watched them moving down the line, I could see that my uncle was going to fall on either a five or a ten. He was positioned just ahead of me. I stepped in front of him and took his place. I was the tenth man.
They brought us into the center of the yard — the Appellplatz — and produced hardwood stakes and a sawhorse. The instructions were precise: walk to the sawhorse, rise on your toes, bend over, but ensure your stomach does not touch the wood. Your heels cannot touch the ground. One man holds your trouser leg to one side while the other delivers the blows. You must count aloud. If you lose count, you begin again from one. If your heel touches the ground, you begin again. If your stomach touches the wood, you begin again.
I counted. I did not stop. I did not lose count. I endured all twenty-five.
That night, lying in the barrack, I thought about my sister Goldie and my little brother Tulie. I thought about the chimneys and the ashes. I thought about the infant in the apartment building back in Karchau, and the screaming that followed the silence.
And I thought: I am still alive. As long as I am alive, I will remember them. Every single one of them.