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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Limor Regev
Without a single bullet fired, the Czechoslovakian country in which I was born disintegrated and virtually ceased to exist.
The familiar and safe streets of my childhood town became threatening, as overt and legitimatized anti-Semitism began to spread like wildfire.
I continued going to the village for vacations even in the period when the earth was already trembling beneath us… Those were moments of happiness in a world that was beginning to unravel.
There were no young people to actively oppose what was happening, and even if they were - the feeling was that complying with the guidelines would allow us to survive until the end of the war. The most correct response then, we felt, was to bow your head and wait until the storm passed.
Most Hungarians actively cooperated with the Germans. Imagine the feeling... We had lived side by side for decades.
Although we were Zionists, we did not want to go and live anywhere else. This was our country, whether the regime was Czech or Hungarian. This was the only home we had ever known: our homeland, which we were willing to defend with our lives and for which many of us had died in past wars.
Only twenty-five years after the many Jewish soldiers of the First World War hung up their uniforms, their homeland turned its back on them and erased from its memory and consciousness the Jews who had fought for it.
In one or two cases, they executed hostages in our area anytime there was a delay in carrying out the instructions. In that way, total obedience was extorted from the people of the city.
You must understand that our future in those days was completely uncertain, for better or worse.
It is possible that if someone had hinted to the Jews of our city that we were being led to our deaths, many of us would have gone into hiding to try to save our lives. Also, most of the Jews obeyed the orders because no information about extermination camps had reached us at that point.
It is important to understand that facts that seem clear after the Holocaust were seen as impossibilities at the time. We felt we were doing everything possible to stay alive until the imminent defeat of Germany.
At that time, the combination of deliberate concealment by the authorities and the human instinct to hope that the future would be better led to obeying the orders.
Systematic German trickery worked well in combination with threats, which prevented us from any thought of refusing to obey.
I remember the expressions on some of the neighbors’ faces looking out the windows of their homes. No one looked really sorry. I believe that their real sorrow came much later, when they saw that some of us had managed to return…
Today everything seems clear, and one might think we should have been aware of what was happening and that we were wrong to obey. But there had never been anything like the Holocaust, and even in their worst nightmares the Jews of my city could not have imagined the horror that awaited us.
There were no survivors that had returned home and could tell us the truth.
If the Hungarians hadn’t helped them, it is doubtful that Germany would have succeeded at this stage of the war in carrying out its satanic plot to murder a community of hundreds of thousands of people within a few weeks.
The almost total collaboration of the Hungarian people and its contribution to the fate of the Jews of Hungary is one of the ugliest stains on the human race in the history of World War II.
We were hungry, thirsty, and thought that our situation would improve as soon as the train reached its destination and stopped. How wrong we were…
1,300,000 people were murdered in the Auschwitz camps - most of them Jews.
The train stopped We had no idea where we were. Then the doors opened.
Three short sentences with heavy meaning
I did not know then that the stranger, who risked his life by approaching me, had saved my life for the first time.
The outside world could not possibly grasp what was actually happening in Auschwitz.
Even the brainwashing that the Germans succumbed to, and the labeling of Jews as subhuman, cannot explain the capability of normal people to murder in cold blood without a shred of human compassion.
We awoke every morning not knowing if we would be alive at the end of the day.
I don’t know if it is even possible to imagine the situation we were in.
At our age, we would usually be embarrassed to expose ourselves and would normally be seeking privacy. They denied us this right, along with so many others.
They had turned us into robots who follow instructions, devoid of human feeling and the motivation to do anything but obey.
The process, by which we lost our individual human identities, was complete. We were now a number...
This humiliation and degradation broke many of us, not only physically but also mentally.
In Auschwitz, I was no more a 13 and a half-year old boy named Moshe Kessler. I became A-4913. Shani was right behind me in the line. He became A-4914.
In a sense, we had become animals in a human jungle, fighting for our lives with all our mental capacity - the only weapon we had left.
Auschwitz was not just a name of a place. It was a planet completely cut off from this world, with its own laws.
If I had encountered them in any other situation I would most likely have been impressed by their character, without any idea that within them lurked a malicious devil.
I think one of the hardest things about this period was knowing that regardless of our tenacity to survive until the war’s end, our lives were in the hands of a cruel and bloodthirsty man, and we were subject to his mood any given moment.
When we returned from work, we found the perpetrator’s body on a stretcher leaning against the camp gate. They hung a sign on it: “This is the fate for anyone who steals a potato.” Even today, 76 years later, the grisly scene sticks in memory.
The truth is, although justice had finally been served and the camp commander was punished at the end of his life, this information gave me no satisfaction. Czerwinski had been free for more than forty years after the war. All those years he lived and worked and did not pay for his atrocious crimes. In the end he received a life sentence justice, but for me it had come too little and too late.
The only thing we had control over was our spirits - the capacity to believe that a better future was ahead, while also knowing that there was a high probability we would not live to see it.
It is hard for me to describe the effect these experiences and sights had on the tender soul of a young boy, who grew up in a warm and loving home, free from any hardship or pain.
The Germans succeeded in neutralizing the innate desire for independence in the human psyche and they extinguished within us the urge to take action and fight for freedom and liberty.
405,000 inmates went through registration as inmates in the Auschwitz camps. Of course, this number does not include those who were sent directly for extermination. Of the 405,000 about 65,000 had so far survived. In its years of operation, approximately 1,500,000 men, women and children were murdered at Auschwitz, representing about one out of four of all Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Part of the loss of our humanity was also a loss of values. The Germans had managed to get many of us to act like animals and not as human beings in the struggle for survival.
The scene looked like it was out of a film. Bedraggled, gaunt creatures in striped shirts wandered the camp. They walked slowly, aimlessly, their gaze hollow and expressionless. No one smiled.
The freedom we dreamed of had come, but the feeling was very different from what we had imagined. Our struggle for survival, day by day, hour by hour, had robbed us of the ability to feel.
We were free but captive to the terrible sights we had witnessed, which would accompany us all our lives.
Before the war, I would not have imagined climbing on top of a train for such a long trip. The resourcefulness that had guided me in making various decisions during the war had once again come to my aid.
When we left home, I had a family. I was a child. That childhood ended a few weeks later, on another train platform, when I had to let go of my mother’s hand.
For months, I dreamed of the moment when I would return home. But I never thought that when that moment came - I would feel I was suffocating, Sad… And completely alone in the world.
In pain, I realized that the world I had known before the war was gone forever. The old life I had been waiting to return to was now only a memory.
It was where I had grown up, but it was no longer a home for me.
