Naftali Furst will never forget his first view of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on November 3, 1944. He was 12 years old.
SS soldiers opened the doors of the cattle car, where he was crammed with his mother, father, brother, and more than 80 others. He remembers the tall chimney of the crematorium, the flames swirling from above.
There were dogs and officers shouting in German “Get out, get out!” Forcing people to jump off the infamous ramp where Nazi doctor Josef Mengele separated children from parents.
Furst, now 92, is one of a dwindling number of Holocaust survivors able to share first-person accounts of the horrors they endured, as the world marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis’ most notorious death camp. Marks. Furst is returning to Auschwitz for the annual occasion, his fourth visit to the camp.
Every time he returns, he thinks about those first moments.
“We knew we were headed for some death,” he said from his home in Haifa, northern Israel, earlier this month. “In Slovakia, we knew that people who went to Poland did not come back.”
stroke of luck
Forth and his family arrived at the entrance to Auschwitz on November 3, 1944, when Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler ordered the end of the gas chambers before their demolition, because Soviet troops were approaching. The order meant that his family were not killed immediately. It was one of many small bits of luck and coincidences that allowed surfing to happen.
“For 60 years, I didn’t talk about the Holocaust, for 60 years I didn’t speak a word of German, even though it was my mother tongue,” Furst said.
In 2005, he was invited to take part in celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, where he was liberated on April 11, 1945, when Stinging moved there from Auschwitz. He realized that there were fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors who could give first-person accounts, and he decided to throw that into memorial work. It will be his furthest visit to Auschwitz for a ceremony to meet Pope Francis in 2016.
Some 6 million European Jews were killed by the Nazis during the mass murder of Jews and other groups before and during World War II. As International Holocaust Remembrance Day. An estimated 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
According to the Convention on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, just 220,000 Holocaust survivors are still alive, and more than 20% are over 90.
a meeting place after the war
Originally from Bratislava, then part of Czechoslovakia, Was just 6 when the Nazis first began implementing measures against the country’s Jews.
He spent the ages from 9 to 12 in four different concentration camps, including Auschwitz. His parents had planned to jump off the cattle car on the way to the camp, but the people pack so tightly that they don’t reach the door.
His father instructed the Entrée family, no matter the situation, to meet at 11 Sulekova St. in Bratislava after the war. Furst and his brother were separated from their mother. After the numbers were tattooed on his arms, they were Thebans from his father. They lived in Block 29 without many other children. As Soviet troops closed in on the area, so they could hear the booms from the tanks, Furst and his brother, Samuel, were forced to join a detour toward Buchenwald, marching for three days in the cold and snow. Had gone. Whoever shoots is behind him.
“We had to prove our will to live, to take another step and another step and keep going,” Heer said. Many gave up, yearning for an end to hunger and thirst and cold, and simply sat down, where they were shot by guards.
“We had this order from my father: ‘You must adapt and survive, and even if you suffer, you must come back,'” Furst recalled.
Furst and his brothers survived the march, and an open-car train ride in the snow, but they became separated at the next camp. When You’re the Dirty One Liberated from Buchenwald, captured in a famous photograph, included Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel in bunkbeds, undergoing the surgery he was given in the world.
But within months, as instructed by the father’s father, the four family members reunited at an address they remembered, the home of family friends. The rest of his family—grandparents, aunts, uncles—were all killed. His family later moved to Israel, where he married, had a date, four grandchildren and three great grandchildren, with another on the way.
‘We cannot imagine this tragedy’
On October 7, 2023, Furst woke up to the Hamas attack on southern Israel, and immediately thought of his granddaughter, Mika Peleg, and her husband and their 2-year-old son, who live in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz on the border with Gaza. Where scores of people were killed or kidnapped.
“It just kept getting worse the whole day that you got any information about what was going on with the subject,” he said. “We saw horrors that we couldn’t imagine this type of horror happening in 2023, 80 years after the Holocaust.”
Towards midnight on October. 7, Peleg’s neighbors sent word that the family had survived. He spent nearly 20 hours locked inside his secure room, with no food or ability to communicate. Her husband’s parents, who both lived on Kfar Az, were killed.
Despite their close relationship, comparisons between Oct. 7 And the Holocaust makes you feel uncomfortable.
“It’s horrible and terrible and a catastrophe, and hard to describe, but it’s not a holocaust,” Heer said. She said the Hamas attack was meant for her granddaughter and others that the Holocaust was a multi-year “death industry”, with massive infrastructure and camps that could kill 10,000 people a day for months at a time. Were, he said.
Furst, who has previously been involved in coexistence work between Jews and Arabs, said his heart goes out to the Palestinians in Gaza, although he believes Israel needs to respond militarily. “I feel the pain of everyone who is suffering, everywhere in the world, because I think I know what suffering is,” Hey said.
Furst knows that he is one of the very few Holocaust survivors still in the abbey to visit Auschwitz, so it is importuning for him to be present to mark the 80th anniversary.
These days, he is telling his story, participating in documentaries and films, serving as president of the Buchenwald Prisoner Association and working to create a memorial statue at the Sred’ concentration camp in Slovakia. .
He has a responsibility to be the mouthpiece for millions of people, and people can relate to a single person’s story more than the more than 6 million deaths, he said.
“What I end up telling the youth is, the fact that you were there to see the living testimony (from a Holocaust survivor) puts a greater requirement on you than someone who didn’t. : The obligation to tell that you carry it on your shoulders.
