Especially for Teachers

Friday, January 28, 2005

Survivors, world leaders mark liberation anniversary

By RAY WEISS
News-Journal Staff writer

PALM COAST — Arthur Fogel remembered Auschwitz on Thursday and the three younger sisters and mother he lost there.

Auschwitz survivor Arthur Fogel, now living in his Palm Coast, points to himself in a photo, Thursday, Jan. 27, 2005, that was taken on a train after he was liberated from the Nazi extermination in Buchenwald and later published in a book entitled The Children of Buchenwald by Judith Hemmendinger and Robert Krell. (Photo: News-Journal/Brian Myrick)

While the world recounted the horror of the infamous Nazi death camp in Poland, he preferred to remain at home with his thoughts, 60 years to the day after Auschwitz was liberated.

"I will probably go back this summer and recite a memorial prayer," he said, sitting at his dining room table. "Personally, it is hard for me, the presentations of politicians. I´m not keen about it. For me, a remembrance is something private."

Fogel was 15 when his father, mother and five sisters, who had been uprooted weeks earlier from a tranquil, rural town in the Czech Republic, were loaded onto a cattle car and sent from a Jewish ghetto in Hungary to Auschwitz in May 1944.

German soldiers with guard dogs hurried the family off the train. Fogel was scared and bewildered.

"Everything happened so fast," he said. "We couldn´t think."

Fogel and his father were pushed into one line; his mother and sisters were herded into another.

In an instant, they were gone.

"I held onto my father," Fogel said. "I didn´t want to let go."

At his dad´s urging, Fogel lied about his age. Claiming he was 18, he was placed with the men. It might have saved his life.

Fogel said children didn´t fare well.

He and his father spent about a month in Auschwitz, before they were sent to Buchenwald, Germany, another concentration camp.

One memory of Auschwitz is his most haunting.

Around twilight one evening, he told his father he was going to take a short walk.

Not far from his barracks, Fogel spotted flames shooting from the roof of a building.

"I saw some Polish Jews who had been there for years. I asked one if he knew what happened to my sisters," Fogel recalled.

"He asked me if they were younger, and then pointed to the chimney. Then, I realized what was happening."

Tears welled in Fogel´s green eyes.

"I didn´t tell my father," he said. "I just kept it to myself."

His mother died at Auschwitz, too. And after the war, he learned his two older sisters had been transferred to a slave-labor camp in Germany, where they also died.

Meanwhile, Fogel and his father, who was in his early 40s, tried to survive in Buchenwald.

Fogel was liberated there by American troops on April 11, 1945.

His father had died a month earlier of tuberculosis.

"He couldn´t take it anymore," Fogel said. "He was so weak."

Fogel, a retired cantor at Temple Israel in Daytona Beach, said being so young proved an advantage.

He survived by sheer instinct, even without food.

"I was not sick at all," he said. "How I survived was unbelievable, because there was nothing to eat."

Fogel and many other children of Buchenwald, including noted author Elie Wiesel, were sent to a school in France for two years.

Fogel went on to Canada, and then in 1956 moved to New York City, where he was a cantor on Long Island.

He and his wife, who have three grown children, moved to Palm Coast six years ago.

"Reality sank in much later about being liberated," he said. "The psychological effect of liberation came much later."

For years, he kept the details of his Holocaust experience to himself, telling very little to his children when they were growing up.

"I sheltered my kids," he said. "I wanted them to grow up in an American atmosphere."

However, Fogel now talks to school groups about those days when the Nazis stole his family and childhood.

But Thursday was a time of personal reflection.

"What goes through my mind today is that I am free," he said. "Free to do what I want."

Fogel then paused for a moment.

"And of course, I think of Auschwitz. I know it as a graveyard, because I lost my mother and my sisters there. That´s where my family´s life was terminated by the Nazis."

Did You Know?

The term "concentration camp" was coined during the Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa:

* In an effort to bring the war to a speedy conclusion, the British established camps to contain prisoners of war and displaced Africans.

* Overcrowding and unsanitary conditions led to more than 30,000 deaths in the camps.

* Two members of Parliament first used the term "concentration camp," naming them after the reconcentrado camps established in Cuba in 1896.

SOURCES: nationalarchives.gov.uk, World Book, Library of Congress

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