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Auschwitz-Birkenau

“I Had a Little Suspicion”

June 20, 2018 by Inside Press

Pre war, my uncle Wolf, with my grandmother and grandfather, before the Nazis separated he and my dad first from their parents. In time, Mengele separated him from my father too.

By Grace Bennett

As  I read of children and babies held hostage in cages–as little more than bargaining chips–my dad’s singularly monstrous experiences of separation and loss during the Holocaust have come back to haunt me.

 Whether you agree that the Holocaust comparisons to the current day madness are fair or not (I admit that I find the comparisons troublesome sometimes), I think when you read this, you might at least agree there are powerful lessons to be learned and that our despair over the abuse and indignities being inflicted on migrant families and especially to the children at our border is entirely warranted.
 
When any category of people are treated so callously, and our President lies so brazenly about ‘who created the situation,’  as the situation persists, yes, you damn well better question authority to the max, and do not stop.
 
To protect helpless children, I do beg you: please lose any moral qualms about assuming the worst.
 
We know full well that the worst is possible. It is all our jobs now to guard against the worst. The worst, the Holocaust taught us, also comes incrementally.
 
But I digress because my dad’s story as a victim of rock bottom evil speaks for itself…
 
After being separated from the rest of his family (all of whom–except for my dad and grandfather–were killed at Auschwitz), my father and Wolf (who was two years younger) had managed to stay alive during the Holocaust after being dragged away for ‘work details,’ i.e.,  slave labor. Together, they suffered and together they survived a series of smaller ‘labor’, i.e., concentration, camps. 
 
Through it all, what meant absolutely the most, what time and again would trigger their survival instinct and help the other through, was that they had each other. They looked out for each other, my dad told me. Being together meant everything.
 
But then they were sent to Auschwitz, too.
 
An excerpt (lightly edited) from my Poppy’s memoir.
 
“The Germans decided to send us to the concentration camp Auschwitz. Arriving there we were greeted by the S.S with the infamous Dr. Mengele. They lined us up and the Dr. was telling us that all injured or too young to do hard work will go to a special location for the injured and children, and will be taken care of.
 
I had a little suspicion.
 
He (Mengele) got in front of me, and for some reason, he asked my age.  I said 16, and added that we are very good workers.
 
My brother (Wolf) said nothing; he was younger than me but taller and a fiery red head.
 
He (Mengele) told my brother to step forward and told him that he will be better off being with children.
 
Our (Jewish) camp leader was a 6’ tall guy. He showed the S.S. officer his damaged finger, so he told him to also go with the children and take care of them.
 
In the meantime my brother came running back asking for half of the bread we still had.
 
I begged him to stay with me, but he argued I should go with him.
 
One of the soldiers noticed the commotion and asked what was going on.
 
I said that I have the whole bread, so he said to break the bread in half and give that to him.
 
They went one way, and we vent to shower, change our civilian clothing into striped uniform and we all got tattoos injected into our forearms.
 
My # was 141940 with an upside triangle underneath.
 
After arriving in the quarters assigned to us, we went outside of our building, meeting people from other buildings, telling them where we came from,
 
I mentioned that I came here with my brother who was transferred to a camp for children.
 
He told me to look at the smoke in the background, and said, “That’s were your brother and all the others are, being incinerated…”
 
 In Wolf’s memory, may the gross mistreatment, abuse, and human rights violations of children at America’s border–AMERICA’S border–STOP. We are better than this.
 
Grace Bennett is Publisher and Editor of the Inside Press.  She has been on the board and advisory board of the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center since 2007 and is a member of Women’s March for All. Her father (‘Poppy’) Jacob Breitstein is a 96-year old Holocaust survivor.
 
 

Filed Under: Just Between Us Tagged With: America's Border, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Border, children, holocaust, human rights

“Why Did They Have to Die?”

January 15, 2018 by Inside Press

Peter Somogyi, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and victim of Nazi experiments on twins, still grieves as he bears witness to the unimaginable.

Story and Photos by Grace Bennett

Mount Kisco–Peter Somogyi , a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, was 11-years-old when he and his twin brother Tamas were ‘selected’ and imprisoned as concentration camp victims and subject to the horrific ‘human experiments’ performed by the notorious Josef Mengele (“the Angel of Death”) and others. Somogyi, now 85 years old, said he would not talk about his imprisonment or experiences for decades.

But at the Boys and Girls Club of Northern Westchester BGCNW on January 7, Somogyi, a member of the Speaker’s Bureau for the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center for the last four years, relayed his memories to attendees.

Jason Fine, Peter Somogyi, Alyzza Ozer and Aaron Notis

Opening the program, Alyzza Ozer, BGCNW’s executive director, said that Somogyi’s talk was the Club’s first in a Civic Advocacy speaker series within ‘Youth for Unity,’ a program launched at BGCNW, which serves 500-800 kids a day, ages 3-18 (nationwide, some 4.2 to 4.3 million). The Club’s mission, she said, is to inspire and enable all youth to be best they can be and advocate on behalf of the community.

Introducing Somogyi were Aaron Notis and Jason Fine, Horace Greeley High School juniors who are volunteering with the HHREC to bring lectures about the Holocaust and genocide to wider audiences. They said they got involved due to a scourge of modern day anti-Semitism and bigotry. They noted that 900 hate incidents were reported across the U.S. in the 10 days following the 2016 election. Those attacks included vandals drawing swastikas on a synagogue, schools, cars and driveways. They pointed out the now infamous march of white supremacists in Charlottesville last October and their anti-Semitic chant. They also expressed concern over a growing, so called BDS movement that veers into anti-Semitism.

Finally, they cited reasons why people of every race and religion need to be aware of exactly what happened during the Holocaust. “In Germany in the 1930’s, the Nuremberg laws institutionalized the racial theories commonly held by Nazis. The laws excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or getting involved with persons of “German or related blood.” Jews were stripped of their German citizenship. They could not own businesses or do business with non-Jews. Jewish children could no longer attend their schools. Jewish doctors could no longer treat non-Jews, and Jews could no longer go to non-Jewish doctors. And this was just the beginning of the prejudices and horrors that Jews encountered.”

 Somogyi’s Journey

 “Somogyi’s Journey” began on March 14, 1944, when the Nazis invaded Hungary. Within two weeks, he recalled the required wearing of yellow stars and people being beaten up on the streets. The Jews were pushed into a ghetto with families living in single rooms confused and beset with fear. Shortly after, roundups began for deportation. “We were told to take only what we can from the ghetto. They gave us some bread but no water whatsoever. It was chaos. Children were crying. All of us…we didn’t know what was happening. On arrival at Auschwitz, exhausted and terrified, anyone ‘able bodied’ was ordered to one side, he explained, and older people and children to the other. “Then along came Mengele asking for twins… they grabbed us. We never had a chance to say goodbye.”

He remembered that his sister Alice was “forced to undress naked” and led with others into a room that was “supposed to be a shower,” he said of the infamous gas chamber, the largest room of the crematorium at Auschwitz, in which hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, children and political prisoners perished. “No one knew that in ten minutes they would all be dead.,” said Somogyi. Some were lucky and died instantly.” He explained how “those who had climbed to the top of bodies in a kind of pyramid, took longer. Within ten minutes, they all died.”

While Alice and his mother Elizabeth and hundreds of others were murdered following that single ‘selection,’ those chosen to ‘work’ were forcibly ‘tattooed’ and told their new identities would be a number. Somoygi showed and recited his own: A74454455. Inside the barracks, the prisoners were assigned six to “a bed” made of tiers of wood planks. There, that night, he learned of his sister’s fate and of the genocide taking place. “We smelled the stench of burning bodies, the flames going up 10-15 feet out of the chimney. The persons who worked at the crematoriums were replaced every two to three months, and gassed themselves, so there would be no eyewitnesses.”

The so called ‘experiments’ began. Mengele was in fact one of dozens of ‘physicians’ participating in this torture. “They were taking blood all the time and measuring everything.” (A slide indicated the victims were injected with unknown substances; a second slide pointed to an experiment which intended to determine how long someone can survive without eating.) “I remember one dwarf (another segment of the population the Nazis targeted for experimentation) “got really, really sick. One morning I had a cold body next to me. Every day, there were six to ten people who died and they lined the bodies up like cinder sticks…”

Somogyi said that the twins considered their horrible situation ironically life saving (“although I hate to call it that,” he said) in that they were of some “use” and despite that the twins and others chosen to be experimented on lived in abject fear “wondering when Mengele would decide he didn’t need us anymore.” They knew that “any moment, any time, we could go to the gas chamber like the others.’  In addition, many of those subject to the experimentation died as a consequence of them; others were murdered in order to facilitate post-mortem examination, according to a document from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

By January, 1945, the Nazis had already lost the war on many fronts. “On January 27, we saw our first Russian soldier,” Somogyi said. “Imagine an 11-year-old thinking, when is my time to die? And then, finally, I am free. You don’t know what kind of feeling that is.”  His brother Tamas survived as well. In time, he discovered that his father Izso had survived Dachau.

He described a journey back first to Budapest (he and Tamas were reunited with their father with a neighbor’s aid in Hungrary) and then to Israel (where he became an officer in the army), from where he left to England, and finally, to the United States.

Somogyi expressed his grief over lost family and friends, stating:  “Why did they have to die? We were persecuted only because we were Jewish.”

Many of the survivors, he explained, could not talk to anyone about what happened for a very long time. As a young man, “a blind date asked me about my number. I asked her never to ask me again.” 

Like many survivors, Somogyi found the inner strength to reinvent his life. He has been married for 56 years to Anna with two children and grandchildren. On one post-war trip in 1990 back to his hometown Pecs in Hungary, he said, “It felt so strange. And I was happy to get away.” “Today,” he offered, “there are people who say this never happened. In 10-15 years, there will be no survivors. I’m here to tell the world that it DID happen, and it’s very lucky I survived.”

At the end of his talk, Shantae Artis, BGCNW’s Community Volunteer Coordinator, commended Somogyi for his openness. “We need to bear witness,” she told the crowd who came out in single digit temperatures to hear him. “Empathy and compassion are tools we need to have to prevent future tragedies so that we never ever have to bear witness again like this.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bearing witness continues when the BGCNW on March 4th at 7 p.m. welcomes guest speaker Rita Kabali Wagener, a survivor under the regime of Idi Amin in Uganda. Do mark your calendar.

Grace Bennett is publisher and editor in chief of the Inside Press, and the 2017 recipient of the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center’s Bernard Rosenshein ‘Courage to Care’ award. For more information and membership info about the Boys and Girls Club of Northern Westchester, please visit bgcnw.com, and for same at the HHREC, please visit hhrecny.org.

Filed Under: New Castle News Tagged With: Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Boys and Girls Club of Northern Westchester, Civic Advocacy, HHREC Speaker's Bureau, Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center, Holocaust education, Josef Mengele, Nazi Twin Experiments, Youth for Unity

Peter Somogyi–Survivor of Auschwitz and Mengele–to Speak at Boys and Girls Club on Jan. 7

December 23, 2017 by Inside Press

Save the date for what is sure to be an incredible speaker presentation at the Boys and Girls Club of Northern Westchester (BGCNW) on January 7 at 7 p.m.

Holocaust survivor Peter Somogyi will be speaking about his experiences during the Holocaust and how he rebuilt his life thereafter. Mr. Somogyi and his twin brother were selected by Dr. Mengele and endured time at Auschwitz as children.

This particular presentation is being promoted by two Greeley high school juniors Aaron Notis and Jason Fine who have been working closely with Millie Jasper, executive director the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center, on bringing Holocaust speakers to wider audiences, “in hopes to reach people who are less familiar with the horrors of the Holocaust and the effects of prejudice and populist leadership,” stated Notis. “Last year, we brought a survivor to the Church of Holy Innocents, and he spoke to approximately 150 participants.”

“It is critical for people to hear these stories…now more than ever,” said Solveig McShea, director of development at BGCNW.

For more information about Mr. Somogyi, please click on the following link: https://hhrecny.org/speakers-bureau/peter-somogyi/

Filed Under: Happenings Tagged With: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Boys & Girls Club of Northern Westchester, Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center, Holocaust Survivor, Peter Somogyi

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