A Life Reborn and Renewed

I wanted to survive most of all because I promised my parents that I would try to stay alive, no matter what, but enough is enough. I suffered long enough to remember the past horrors without giving up hope for a better tomorrow. I felt obligated to hold on, not only for my generation; but for our religion, all religions, nationalities, races, creeds, and humanities hopefully to avoid genocide. For other people, I also wanted to survive to be able to see and be reunited with my family, to be able to love again, and a chance to live like a human being.

For some reason the people in our section or barrack in Buna were exposed to some of the most barbaric horrendous brutality imaginable sometimes even more than the others interned in other sections; here we endured some of the most barbaric inhumane acts that were meted out in our camp or anywhere on earth.

It might have been because a lot of Kapos and Blockelsters assigned over us by the SS were of German and other Aryan extraction and were formerly convicted murderers or condemned hardened criminals. Because they enthusiastically did the dirty work, and because of their meanness they, of course, were given extra food ration, sometimes eating in front of us to make us suffer more from our hunger pain, they also had better beds and favors by the SS, thereby becoming even more enthusiastic torturers and doing the SS dirty work even better. We feared them just as much or more than some of the guards.

We were petrified when some young SS man would come into our section of the camp for fun and personal joy to show us that Germany and its people were invincible and beyond human caring or feeling, such as making us throw a young boy into the air so he would catch him with a bayonet on his rifle which unfortunately ended up sticking through his young frail boys body. When I saw this I wanted to die, and be taken out of my misery quickly but I remembered my commitment to my parents, so I was somehow able to hang on. Our Jewish lives or mainly others meant absolutely nothing to any of them, only their joy of proving that Germany's leader, Hitler, his Fascist edict and cohorts, ruled over everything including God, and indeed the entire world’s humanity.

We had a very dreary looking harsh woman come into Buna our camp similar to Elsa Koch, who was the SS commander's wife of Buchenwald (where I was liberated). Elsa was known as the "bitch" of Buchenwald. This SS woman was known as the bitch of Auschwitz; she would come into the camp and make us stand for hours lined up on the parade ground, Apel Platze with our bare arm sticking out with the branded tattoos showing. She would make us stand there sometimes for hours, no matter what the weather was like even in the bitter cold, as she selected young boys my age to step forward to make sure the skin was the right color she picked and wanted that day for her lamp shades, handbag or other items.