[Music plays] Welcome. Thank you for joining us for First
Person: Conversations with Holocaust Survivors. My name is Bill Benson. I have hosted the Museum's
First Person program since it began in 2000. Thank you for joining us today. Through these monthly
conversations, we bring you first-hand accounts of survival of the Holocaust. Each of our
First Person guests serves as a volunteer at the Museum. Holocaust survivors are Jews who experienced
the persecution and survived the mass murder that was carried out by the Nazis and their
collaborators. This included those who were in concentration camps, killing centers, ghettos, and
prisons, as well as refugees or those in hiding. Holocaust survivors also include people who did
not self-identify as Jewish but were categorized as such by the perpetrators. In the wake of
yet another attack on an American synagogue, this conversation, with someone who survived the
deadly consequences of unchecked hatred, feels even more urgent. Survivors' experiences take
on new relevance and illustrate that violent antisemitism remains a threat to Jews and to all
of society. Steve, thank you so much for joining us and being willing to be our First Person
today. It is a pleasure to have you with us. Steven: Hello. Hello, everyone. Bill: Thank you Steve,
and before we start, I'd like to remind our audience members to please send us
questions and let us know where you're joining us from in the chat. Steve, you have so much to
share with us we will start right away. You were born in June 1931 in Subotica, Yugoslavia, just
across the border from Hungary. Please start us off by telling us about your city and community in
the years leading up to the start of World War II. Steven: Okay. Subotica had been part of Hungary for
a long time. After Hungary lost in World War I, the Versaille Treaty allocated the city and
the region to the new state of Yugoslavia. Uh, the city had about 100,000 people. Serbs, Croats,
Hungarians were the three major ethnic groups. Much smaller groups of ethnic Germans,
Gypsies, and Jews. There were about 6,000 Jews in the city, roughly divided about 4,000 belonging
to a, what was called the progressive community in practices similar to what something like the
modern Orthodox these days, and the rest were very small congregations
of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews. The place was not, not always very peaceful.
We as children liked to go to the soccer games, round robin, between the three ethnic
groups not to see the actual play, but to see the mounted police storm the field when the
fans became engaged in fighting. So the Jewish community was
associated with the Hungarian group, Hungarian-speaking group. My family
was not particularly observant. They, here is my family: Mother, Father, my
sister, and I. My father wanted to have a small vineyard, and this is the tenant's house
on the vineyard, and we are inspecting the rabbit hutch. This was taken in the spring
of 1941 just weeks or, before the [audio stops] Bill: The Hungarian, right before the occupation? Steven: I'm sorry? Bill: This was taken right
before the occupation by the Hungarians, right? Steven: Yes. Bill: Steve, tell us about your father who we see here in that picture, of course. Tell us about his newspaper work. Steven: This is the editorial staff of the newspaper that was published by Fenves and Partners. The major owner was my uncle who was also editor-in-chief of
the paper, and my father was his second hand man and ran the, was director of the
printing, publishing house that produced the paper. When my uncle died in 1935 my father
became the editor-in-chief of the newspaper. He was always very pleased with the editorial
staff. There are Hungarians, several of them. Particularly the seated gentleman became very
well-known in Hungary after World War II. My father was very proud
of the plant, in particular he was very proud of the huge printing press
that he bought in Austria as a piece of surplus property during the hyperinflation
right after the war. It was a huge plant that never worked, and there
was a whole series of mechanics that had to be kept at hand to fix the machine so that the
paper could be produced. Bill: That is an impressive bit of equipment, I must say. So I can see why he was so proud of it. Tell us about your mother. Steven: My mother was a graphic artist educated at the
university in Budapest. Afterwards she did travel, extensively travel in Austria,
then Italy, and then France. She did a lot of commercial work, very few fine paintings, but
a lot of lithographs and etchings. And this is her self-portrait out of a sketchbook sheet with women in hats but she displayed herself in one of them, and I always think it's the
sunniest self-portrait of her. Bill: Her name was Klara, right? Steven: Her name was Klara Gereb, yes. This is a lithograph of the castle at Fontainebleau in France. She did sketches on her travel and then she converted them into, reproduced
them as lithographs and etchings. The family lore was that my parents became
acquainted when my father, he hired her to do artwork for the newspaper including
the new mast, head mast, of the paper after the paper name had to be changed
when Subotica went from Hungary to Yugoslavia. She continued to do a lot of commercial
work. She had a few exhibitions, but she was not active as an artist. She was very
active in art education of my sister and myself leading us into all kinds of techniques and study of art. Bill: Steven, you also had
a sister. Would you tell us about Eszti? Steven: Well, here we are. My sister Eszti was two
years older than I, well-known in, all over town for her long braids. This is also taken
in spring of 1941. She's in, the insignia on her school uniform identifies herself as second
year student in the high school, namely a sixth grader. Bill: That is such, that
is such a lovely... Steven: Much more outgoing than I, but she was, we fought often
as children usually for territorial reasons in our shared playroom, but we also did a
lot of things together throughout our lives until she passed away some six years ago. Bill: That is a very lovely photo, a very happy photo. Steve, tell us a little bit about what daily life was like for you and your sister prior to the occupation. Steven: Well, we,
I should say I lived a very happy, upper middle class life. Our family servants
were a cook, about whom I will talk later, maids, a German governess so that we would
study, learn proper German rather than the rough Swabian stock spoken on the streets, and a
chauffeur. Before you say, "Aha, all this wealth", keep in mind that Yugoslavia was a dirt poor country
and the social convention of my parents' level was that if you could afford a car -- we had
a car maybe there were 100 other cars in the town if that many -- you could also afford to
support another family by hiring a chauffeur. So we had a very rich life, lots of parties,
lots of places of entertainment. Two movie houses was a big thing, theater,
ice skating rink in the winter, recreational swimming in a nearby lake. It was a
very comfortable and exciting life with lots of, lots of things to do. Bill: And of course,
Steve, that would all change profoundly on April 6, 1941. The Axis Powers involving
German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian military units invaded Yugoslavia, and five days later your hometown was occupied by Hungarian forces. Hungary had anti-Jewish laws and regulations similar to
those in Germany which severely restricted Jewish life. Please share with us what happened to you
and your family on the first day of the occupation. Steven: On the first day of occupation, a
Hungarian officer with a drawn revolver expelled my father from his office. The
plant was, plant and newspaper were confiscated and a Aryan administrator was appointed who
made a formal statement that his intention was to pauperize the family, which he very
successfully did. And so by law all the employees had to be discharged.
Jews could not employ Gentiles. Our German governess didn't even wait for that. On
the very first day she marched out of the house declaring that she was not going to
spend another night in a Jew's house. So that was the beginning of a very
constricted life with further and further pressure, humiliation coming
from the Hungarian government. Bill: Steve, there were all kinds of restrictions
and increasing forms of humiliation that were piled on the Jews in your town.
Describe a few of those to us. Steven: Every month there was a call. Something had
to be, either, was confiscated and that had to be carried out, carried over to the police
station or some further restriction. All of them intended to humiliate and expose the people to
the rage of the community around them. For me, in terms of entertainment,
movie houses were closed, the popular local beach was closed to Jews, but the
most severe restriction was schooling. Hungary from 1920s had a law limiting the
representation of Jews in places of higher education that included academic
high schools. So I had a brutal, grueling exam intended in atrocious way to flunk you, and
eventually I was one of nine boys out of probably 45 or so who were admitted to
fifth grade, first year of the gymnasium. Admission meant nothing. For the following three
years, we nine of us sat in the back row. There was no point in raising your hand. No
teacher would ever recognize your presence there except when he, he or she wanted to
say some derogatory thing about Jews or just discharge a curse on the fly
while lecturing on whatever subject. That was, that was very difficult.
My father became quite ill from all of this, and the restrictions were just, kept
piling on, on, and on. Bill: Steve, before we continue, I'd like to acknowledge for you that we have people viewing and listening to you from all over the place including viewers from Colorado,
Minnesota, South Carolina, Idaho, and Kansas. And we have international viewers from Canada, Germany, the
United Kingdom, Denmark, South Africa, and India. So, you're being watched and heard from around the
globe. We also have a couple of comments that have come in already if I could share those
with you. Melanie says, "Thank you for sharing. It's so important that your story and others like
you are heard." And then Tracy, another viewer, says, "Thank you for continuing to tell your story so
that today's generations can hopefully learn from the past." Steve, with your father's, with the
family newspaper being confiscated so brutally, income stream stopped for the family. How did
your family make ends meet during that time? Steven: By selling everything we had. The dining
room furniture went first. Whatever was valuable including the stamp collection
that I labored on so, quite hard. Everything had to go. It was not unusual for my mother to
go to the market with a couple tablecloths in her basket and return with a basket of fruits
and vegetables and occasionally a piece of meat. That was the norm. Bill: Steve, as it became clear that Nazi
Germany would lose the war, Hungary began attempting to negotiate peace with the
Allies. As a result, in the spring of 1944, Germany moved quickly to occupy Hungary including
Subotica, your town. Tell us what happened to your father and how conditions for your
family changed when the Germans occupied your town. Steven: Well just to put it in context, 600
German troops constituted the occupying force in Hungary. Within five or six weeks 600,
I'm sorry, 300,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz. When I speak to school groups I ask
them to do a little mental arithmetic to ask how many Jews each of the 600 German
soldiers had to deport. The answer is zero. They sat in their barracks. The Hungarian state police had a
worked out plan, rehearsed with a mini pogrom just south of Subotica, and in a
matter of weeks, taking region by region, they collected and deported everybody. All of
the Jews, except for Budapest, Admiral Horthy stopped them. So we
were forced to leave the home and go into a ghetto. Bill: Steve, tell us about
your father's arrest. Steven: A few days after the German occupation, very early one morning, my father was arrested
by a group of Hungarian plainclothes policemen and taken away. We watched it, him go
from the window. With his health and condition none of us ever expected to see him
alive again. They were taken to a nearby village and from there we lost
track of him for the duration of the war. Bill: And then of course you were forced to leave your home. Tell us about that. Steven: That's one of the darkest days of my
life. I don't know how the event was advertised, papers or whatever, but the fact is that we
lived on the second floor and as we were leaving as per the orders, and descending
the staircase, every rung on in the staircase was occupied by a person waiting to get in the
apartment and ransack it. They were yelling at us, cursing us, screaming at us, spitting at us
as we trundled down with the little bundles. Bill: And I assume these included neighbors. Steven: I presume. I did not have, I didn't look up, saw their faces. I just felt their spittle in my, on my face. Unbeknownst to us, our former cook whom we had let go, had to let go, three years ago was with the crowd. She went in and very methodically collected my mother's recipe
book, a diary of my mother's from her bedroom, and in her former studio stuffed
a big cardboard folder with as much artwork on paper as she could, and carried
it away and returned it to us after the war. Bill: Including the art that we just
saw a few minutes ago of your mother's. Steven: Including, right, right. Bill: Steve, so once you were out, forced out of the house
and it was ransacked, and your father was gone, where were you and your family sent? Steven: Into a small transition camp set up in a nearby village where the Jews from the region were collected and then from right there lined up in front of a row of
railroad cars and packed into the boxcars, 80 people to a boxcar.
The doors were shut, clanged shut, and we were off. Eight days, something like eight days nobody could
keep track, eight days locked up. No food, no drink, no sanitation facilities except the bucket
that filled up in here. People are going mad, people dying which we considered a benefit
because the bodies could be, would be stacked in one corner giving us a little more space
to scrunch down. That was, that's how we spent several days. Bill: Steve, before
we continue on with you describing to us Auschwitz, I'd like to remind our audience to please share their questions for Steve via the chat feature. And I'd also like, Steve, to share
another comment with you from a viewer, Motashim, who says, "Hi, I am from Bangladesh. I have been
watching some content related to the Holocaust on YouTube, and today I came here to learn
more." So we welcome him from Bangladesh. Steve, so June 16th, 1944 was when you,
your family, and others were forced onto the train that took you to Auschwitz as you described.
You arrived in Auschwitz with your mother, your sister, and your grandmother. Share with us
what that was like for you to arrive there. Steven: Well, we didn't know where we were anytime in
this trip except we had the sense that we were crossing the Carpathian Mountains and deduced
that we were being shipped into occupied Poland. Suddenly the doors clanged open and we were
surrounded by noise of dogs barking, men yelling, batons hitting, but even more
violently by a horrendous stench that which is still sometimes seems like
it fills my nostrils, and shouts, yells. Anybody who could not jump out, jump off the train
was thrown out. We're told to leave all of our belongings on the railroad siding and
eventually men and women separated as shown on the slide. It's definitely can't
be our group, but there were trains arriving daily. And then eventually a SS officer
stood in front and waved people right and left at which, at that time
none of us had any idea what right or left meant, but we soon found out. I happened to be in the
group that was sent to live. The other group was sent to the gas chamber in the crematorium. Bill: Steve, at this point did you know what happened to your mother, your sister,
and your grandmother? Steven: My grandmother had in her youth an accident and she had, her
leg was amputated and she had a artificial leg. So she must have been carried to the gas chamber.
My mother and sister were lined up that I waved to them from the parallel
line. That's the last view I had of my mother. She perished very soon after she got to Auschwitz. Bill: Steve, Auschwitz, which is located in German-occupied Poland, consisted of multiple camps including a killing center at Auschwitz-Birkenau. What were conditions
like in Auschwitz, and what was daily life like for you in the camp and
what happened to you on that first day? Steven: On the first day we were marched off from the
siding into a huge building. We were stripped naked, all body hair shorn, a cold shower with no
towels, eventually thrown unsorted pieces of prisoner clothing and unmatched shoes. And
so after a while we managed to trade and get something that could be worn. We didn't know that
it was going to be worn for months without washing. And we were marched into this huge compound.
Auschwitz is well-known as a, an extermination camp where at least a million and
a half people were killed in the region on the upper right of the screen, but if you look at
this region in the middle it will remind you of something like the stockyards in Chicago and kinds of city where cattle are stockpiled waiting to be slaughtered. Bill: So what we see
here, Steve, is an aerial view of a close-up of Auschwitz. Steven: Taken in September 1944 and I was
standing somewhere there while, somewhere in the barrack marked by the white signal. Bill: If we we could just spend a moment here, Steve, just to reiterate what you said. When this photo
was taken in September 1944, you were there and that white highlighted space is a barrack um and it just it's it's impossible to not see the analogy you gave to the stockyards just
thousands and thousands of people in there. How many were in that one barrack that you were
in? Steven: A thousand. Bill: A thousand in that one barrack. Steven: Okay, so Auschwitz you know beyond the
killing center was this stockyard where inmates were stocked to be lined up for
inspection as German officials, military and civilian, came to select suitable slave
laborers available cheaply to be worked to death. That was the function. The people who survived
Auschwitz are those who, in four or five days, managed to get out on an outgoing transport. I
was there for five months because this entire barrack full of youths where I was was simply a
mistake by the officers at the railroad siding of letting a few of us undersized skip the
gas chamber, and of course if any self-conscious manager of a plant or quarry or mine
looking for cheap slave labor who could do hard work obviously bypassed 15, 16 year 13, 12 year old
kids and didn't bother, went on to one of the other barracks to select prisoners. So we were
there, had no other duty than waiting to die. Bill: And yet somehow you managed to
become an interpreter at the age of 13. Steven: Yes. If any of you have ever seen a Sing Sing or
Alcatraz movie, you know that in a penal colony there are, the inmates feared the guards and
feared the internal people who are in control. And they fear the latter more because
the guards are locked out at night. The SS used this method very effectively. The trustees who were in
charge of the individual barracks were at first common criminals, many murderers who
were brought in from the prisons and given the task of supervising, managing the
inmates. They were vicious, more vicious than the SS and certainly with more hatred and, hatred towards Jews than probably most of the SS. Their mode of conversation
with an inmate was through a whip or a baton, and in our barracks with the young kids, the
normal outcome of a conversation was that the other person was dead from the beating
administered as part of the conversation. So eventually they decided that
something else had to be done, and interpreters were appointed. I was fluent enough in German
to become one of those interpreters. Bill: At age 13, yeah. Steven: The reward was that after the inmates were fed
twice a day with soup out of these big cauldrons, I was allowed with my spoon to clean out
the bottom of these barrels and take whatever was left there. My intervention
in interpreting was of very little value. Whatever I was called for, the argument between
a inmate and the trustee, the overseer usually ended in a violent death of the inmate
who dared to offend the trustee in some way. Bill: Tell us, Steve, about the night of August 2nd, 1944
and how that then affected your life? Steven: Unbeknownst to us in the barrack that I
showed you, two compounds further north was the Gypsy compound. Several thousand, several thousand
Gypsies, older men and women and children under horrible conditions were living in these
barracks. They didn't have to stand for the morning and evening roll call, but they
lived in miserable conditions and on that night, in one night, they were exterminated.
We were locked into our barracks, all of the camp was on a lockdown, and we heard the screams,
the shouts, and the repeated shots, and the following morning when we were allowed out, two
compounds over we could see inmates cleaning, emptying the barracks and eventually whitewashing them. This was a momentous day for me because that was the day I
stopped preparing for my own death. Up till then there was certainty that no
kid from our barracks will ever be picked out and allowed out and would not die there in Auschwitz
of starvation because with this change in the camp, the SS authorities decided that
the German criminals were just not bright enough, clever enough to impose discipline,
and they replaced all of the criminal overseers with political prisoners, most of them communists
who they knew one thing: knew how to organize. So in our compound all of the overseers
became Polish political prisoners. One of them came over to our barrack
and said he was looking for a interpreter who could interpret
with Hungarian, Polish, and German. Now coming from Yugoslavia, I knew that Czech,
that Polish was another Slavic language and the reason that it could not be too different from
Serbian, which I had in school, and so I volunteered. And he accepted me. It turned out that Polish
was quite different. It took me quite a while with the help of several of the overseers to
learn Polish, but I began working for the Polish political prisoners.
They made it clear that they are a resistance organization and that working for
them requires the same commitment to fight, to resist, and to work towards freedom as
they themselves had. So I was, they gave me my life back. I had a purpose, I had something that
I could fight for, and that's what I did for the rest of the years and the rest of that year
in concentration camp. Bill: So you were you were part of an internal resistance then... Steven: Yes. Bill: ...inside Auschwitz.
Tell us what kinds of things you were doing. Steven: Okay, two things: legal and illegal.
Legally, it was my job as an interpreter to meet a German official, escort him to
whichever compound he was directed to, serve as an interpreter while he interrogated
and chose slaves for his, for whatever trade he represented. That was a big responsibility.
You quickly learned to embellish the responses. If they were looking for somebody in
lumber yard, forest clearing, whatever, as soon as I heard the word "wood"
then from any of the inmates, I immediately start describing to the German that "This is a
seasoned lumber man," et cetera, et cetera. You have to be very careful not to over-embellish the story. They
counted your words comparing to theirs so that you didn't elaborate, didn't embellish the
story, but under those constraints you could help a lot of people get out of
that hell. That was their official duty. Unofficially I was part of the resistance
organization, and being small and slight, on trips that full-size men couldn't. In
particular there was a roof repair detail. Even the SS realized that with the coming
winter the miserable barracks needed some improvement. So we worked on a cart, a hand
pulled cart. One overseer, four or five workers and I tagging along as interpreter. And we had
the freedom to move from compound to compound including visiting the women's compound.
You ask why? Well, the woman political prisoner overseer in that, of one of the barracks in
that compound had been the prewar girlfriend of the Polish Kapo that led our group. So we
frequently made social visits there. On one of those, I encountered my sister. She was on the
way, she was being sent out on a outgoing transport. I met, she told us, she told me that she
was separated from our mother immediately but that she understood from others that our
mother's condition became worse and worse, and one morning she was carted away with the
with the night's dead and directly taken to the crematorium. That was normal practice
there was no, no point of wasting another dose of Zyklon gas on people who were mentally, emotionally already dead. So I
eventually cashed all my black market goodies to make sure that, and I got her a sweater and
scarf before we went out. Bill: A sweater and a scarf to help her as she left. Steve, I'd like to bring in a video question that we have from a student, Annalise, from Bethesda, Maryland. Let's
hear from Annelise. Annalise: My name is Annalise and I go to school in Bethesda, Maryland. As you were such a young teenager when Germany invaded Hungarian-occupied Yugoslavia and you were sent to
a ghetto and a transit camp and finally Auschwitz, was it difficult having so much responsibility placed on you as an interpreter when you were only 13 years old? Bill: Annalise is asking the very question
I know that's on my mind. Was it difficult having so much responsibility placed on you as
an interpreter when you were only 13 years old? Steven: I was never aware or bothered by mundane
things like responsibility. There was, I had a opportunity to resist in
some form, and faking interviews was one of the opportunity I had, so I did it.
So I understand the young lady's question, but this was not a normal world. Here you,
if you had a chance of doing anything contrary to the rules, you did it even knowing that any
encroachment was punishable by death. That didn't, that didn't matter. You did it. Bill: You did it. Steve, you
you managed to get out of Auschwitz. How did you do that? Steven: The resistance organization simply smuggled me out. A transport that they thought was safe,
they asked a inmate in line whether he would change places with me, and they assured him that
they would get him out on another safe transport. We changed places, I went through the
the processing line, got myself tattooed. By that time in Auschwitz only outgoing inmates
were tattooed. Another train ride, a little more comfortable. At least once a day we were
let out to stretch our legs and there was some substitute
coffee or maybe a piece of bread. And so we, eventually the train stopped at a place
that said "Niederorschel" and we got out. And that was my, that
was the first introduction. Bill: What was Niederorschel? Tell us about
your arrival there. Steven: Niederorschel was a small, very small camp, no more than 700 inmates, attached to a Focke-Wulf, to a plant producing wings of
Focke-Wulf fighter planes. Later on when I read about it, I was surprised
that the camp was opened only in the spring of 1945. Bill: 1944? Yep. Steven: 1944. That's when, by that time
the big heavy military installations were bombed to smithereens and so Germany decided to
regroup and divide the work into some very small units connected by railroads and revived the
construction. It never worked. Eventually the yard, railroad was bombed and we couldn't
get pieces and we couldn't ship out our wings, but anyhow. Okay, let me say something about it, in the
arrival. The SS command gave a speech which essentially said, "And everything is punishable
by death." The German foreman gave a speech insisting that the precision and
punctuality were the most important things, and then a translator translated these speeches
into Hungarian. The majority of the inmates on the transport were Hungarian Jews. Then something weird
happened. The foreman recognized me in the group, walked up to me, and in a loud voice said, "What are
you doing here? I did not select you in Auschwitz." I had been his interpreter in Auschwitz.
Well, the resistance organization in Auschwitz drilled me for situations like that, like
presidential debate candidates are prepared for their questioning, except
this was not one of the questions that they had anticipated. So quickly I collected
my thoughts and said, "Well sir, with this many new inmates they thought that you would need another
interpreter." Never specifying who "they" were. And he said, "Oh, that's a good idea," and walked
away. He and the German civilian workers accepted me as an interpreter, the SS never
did. They never wanted to deal through me. We were led into the camp, obviously much better
conditions than Auschwitz. We got our first meal, warm meal with some taste, and the
interpreter and another inmate sat next, either side of me really crowding me in
and started asking questions. Who was I? Where did I come from? How come the foreman
knew me? How come my prisoner's clothes were more fitting than the others? So I answered
the questions. That night they led me to the room of the Kapo, the overseer who was
German. Had been in concentration camps since 1933, and he was the leader of the pack. They started
questioning me. One of the orderlies was Gypsy. He had heard some rumors about
the Gypsies in Auschwitz but didn't know much more than that. I explained the situation
to him, what I saw. And there were Soviet prisoners of war in the camp represented
in the small group by a cavalry officer. The Germans did not honor the Geneva Convention
with respect to prisoners of war and the Soviet soldiers were in the camp with us. He
wanted to test my knowledge of Polish, and we sort of exchanged a couple sentences in Polish. We both realized that Russian and Serbian are much more alike than either is to Polish, so
from that point on we conversed in this mix of Serbian and Russian. And so I was accepted
in the resistance organization. We, as I said, the plant, we worked
14 hours a day, six and a half days a week. Strenuous labor, I won't say hardly, but strenuous
labor. I worked on the inspection line inspecting the rivets in the wing. Whatever could be stolen
was stolen. We never used the word, it was always "liberating" was the word. We "liberated" scraps of
aluminum, we "liberated" tools, anything that can be converted into weapons. And at night there was
continuous activity of doing things with, for exchange trade with the civilians. Jewelers were very good at that, making weapons and so on. So it was a very exciting life. Bill: Steve, before I,
there's so much more you could tell us about your time at Niederorschel, including things like, that in the midst of all that some of the older inmates felt that the few youngsters there like you still needed to get a little education. So at night in the middle of everything else, you were being schooled in algebra,
in history, in geography, and even English I think you said to me but... Steven: French, French. Bill: Steve, you remained at Niederorschel camp for
six months from September 1944 until April 1945. As the Allies approached, you and your fellow
inmates were forced on a march. Tell us about that. Steven: Yes on April 1, 1945, we were
marched out of the barracks. It took 11 days to reach the
main concentration camp at Buchenwald. People were laggards, were falling behind. They
were shot and left dead in the trenches. There were attempts at escape, some were successful.
Others very sad to see German civilians bringing back escapees with
hands tied with barbed wire, prodding them with pitchforks, and standing around chatting with the
guards until they were shot in front of their eyes. Eventually we got to Buchenwald. From stories of others, I recognized that it was a very quick entry. Crematorium was not
working. We were sent into a barracks. Now we knew about some of the preparations the inmates,
the resistance organization in Auschwitz, which was very powerful, the steps that they were planning
to take, to self-liberate the camp, and we kids had grandiose images that we were going to be
active partners in that. Well, it turned out that I collapsed on a cot, and the next thing I heard
is one of my buddies shaking me awake, "You stupid idiot, you slept through it all! The
Americans have arrived." So that was un-glorious, my introduction to liberty. Bill: And so here we see American troops from the Sixth Armored Division entering Buchenwald. And this is where you had missed their entry. Steve, you were in
very bad shape, and I know you want to share with us about the care that you received
once the Army arrived. Steven: I collapsed against the barbed wire fence, fortunately by then power was off. Eventually I woke up on a cot the US Army, specifically 121st,
124th, field evacuation hospital set up a huge hospital for those of us who survived
in the facilities that were previously, that were built and previously used
for recuperating wounded SS. No, I don't remember that. I'm told that all of
us were stripped naked, liberally doused with DDT, given a bath, et cetera, put on cots. Anyhow,
I woke up and very slowly I was nursed back to life. My hand had been broken by a guard during the
march. That was reset and I slowly began to learn simple things like cleaning under the
fingernails or how to use a knife and fork again. So I was in Buchenwald till late in the
summer. The Iron Curtain already existed, and going back east was much more
difficult than the people of France, Belgium, Norway, et cetera who were cleared out the first week. Bill: Steve, if I could bring in a question from one of our viewers, Faith. She asks, "Did you return to Yugoslavia immediately after the war after your recovery, and did you
find any other surviving family members after the war?" Steven: Yes, thank you for asking.
I had known in Buchenwald that my sister was alive and that she was recovering from typhus
in Bergen-Belsen. So we got reunited but then what appeared to us a miracle happened: our father
arrived on a Soviet military hospital train and was wheeled in to my aunt's house, where we
lived at that time, totally broken physically and emotionally, unable to accept that his wife had
passed away, and he died a couple months later. The other big miracle was that our cook reappeared
and gave us back the stuff that she had taken. Bill: Including your mother's artwork and, this is a
terrific photo. Describe the importance of this photograph. Steven: The settee on which we sit in this small
apartment that we had later was from my parents' parlor. It disappeared during the upheaval.
Our former cook and her husband saw it on a cart, they strong-armed the guy who pushed the cart and
gave it to us. And when my sister and I in '47 escaped from Yugoslavia, we deeded it to the local museum. Bill: Where it sits to this day, right? Steven: Where it sits to this day, not on display but in the lobby of the director's office. So if you ever get to Subotica, go see the museum, which is in our former home, and ask to see the settee from the former home. Bill: I intend to do that as soon as
I am able to do that. I want to sit on that settee. Steve, I have one more question for you. In the face
of rising global antisemitism, please tell us why you continue to share your firsthand account
of what you experienced during the Holocaust. Steve: Well, first of all, as a survivor I feel
that I have a obligation to speak on behalf of those who are not able to speak. And
in that process I try to convey to the audience that feelings of, that wherever you see inequity,
injustice, prejudice, bigotry, discrimination, you see the makings of, the potential makings
of another genocide or Holocaust. Those feelings can be easily fanned up, fanned to violent
hatred by a few dedicated people, and in cases where this hatred gains government support,
government encouragement, government recognition, government support, genocides possibly on
the scale of the Holocaust are still possible. There have been umpteen genocides
since World War II. In my own native country of Yugoslavia, there
have been two, in Bosnia and in Kosovo. It's occurring all over, has been occurring all over
the world. So whatever I can do to make you realize how these hatreds can be fanned and turned into
genocide, I try to do so. Bill: And Steve, you do it extraordinarily well.
Brilliant, in fact. It's so important that you continue to do this. Thank you for doing it for
us today. There's so much more that you could have shared, I think everybody knows that you just
were able to give us a glimpse. You even hinted at something that we wish we could talk about and
that is how you escape later from Yugoslavia, but we'll have to save that for another time. So Steve,
thank you so much for being our First Person today. Steve: Thank you for doing it. Thank you to the audience. Bill: Thank you. I would also like to take a moment to thank our donors. First Person is made possible through generous support from the Louis Franklin Smith Foundation. Next week please join the Museum to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On Thursday, January 27th, please join a live conversation with another Holocaust survivor, Arye Ephrath, at 9:30 AM Eastern Time. This Facebook Live program will focus on the risky choices that are made to protect and save a child's life. Our next First Person on February 16th at 1:00 PM Eastern Time, will feature a conversation with Holocaust survivor and Museum volunteer, Halina Peabody. Halina's mother, Olga, protected her two daughters by securing false papers identifying them as Catholic. For years, they were constantly on the move to evade detection and possible arrest, or worse. Thank you all for watching today's First Person program.
