Two Auschwitz Holocaust survivors on Thursday Nov. 10 spoke at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, recounting their harrowing tales as young boys held captive and transported by German soldiers in freight cars to concentration, extermination and labor camps in occupied Poland during World War II.
The two men were part of an event sponsored by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute to commemorate the anniversary of the November Pogrom — or Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” — 84 years ago when Nazi leaders unleashed violence against the Jewish people. They attacked them in their homes, burned their synagogues and shattered 7,500 plus Jewish-owned commercial establishments.
The remembrance was also focused on the arrival at Reagan Library of a German-made, World War II-era, Model 2 freight car like those used to transport Jews, Roma, Poles and many others to ghettos, execution sites, concentration camps and extermination centers.
Speaker David Lenga was 11 years old and lived in Poland when the war broke out.
For the next six years he was underfed, starving and forced into hard labor, uncertain of what would happen to him in death camps and ghettos surrounded by barbed wire, armed soldiers and German Shepherd dogs that could rip a boy apart.
Of his 100 extended family members, only he and his dad survived.
Lenga witnessed the horror and mayhem for years: the hanging of Jews in the town center, naked bodies laying in the streets, victims buried in mass graves, and seeing a person one day — and then never again.
“These are the sights, these are the things, the sufferings I went through,” Lenga said.
Joe Alexander, who also lived in Poland, had 10 minutes to get to the town square with his family before being taken away to the camps. For the next six years he lived in 12 different camps, surviving them all and escaping death.
When he and others arrived by freight car at Auschwitz, 30% to 40% of those in the cars were dead.
The rest lined up in rows of five to meet Josef Mengele, a German Schutzstaffel officer and physician also known as the Angel of Death.
Mengele told the group it was six kilometers to walk to the camp.
“He said he’s going to select people to go to the left and people on the left were to be taken by trucks,” said Alexander, as he stood alongside a German-made, World War II-era, Model 2 freight car like the one used to take him from one camp to another.
“He picked out six people, old people, young kids and I was a little guy and he picked me out to go to the left,” he remembered. “But I was in seven camps (by then) … and when Dr. Mengele moved down the line I went back to the other side — and if I didn’t run back to the other side, I would not be here talking to you. People on the left went in trucks straight to the gas chamber.”
The freight cars, established by Nazi Germany across occupied Europe, were used to transport up to 80 people, along with their belongings, crammed like sardines into each car without food, water or facilities for what was often a several-day journey to a grim reality.
As part of the remembrance, a dark-brown, German-made, World War II-era, Model 2 freight car was escorted on Thursday by a motorcade led by 50 plus motorcycles, including those of the Patriot Guard Riders, military veterans and the Simi Valley Police Department up the long, winding Presidential Drive to the museum’s main courtyard where it will be on display highlighting the upcoming traveling exhibition, “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away” beginning March 24.
Hundreds of personal items such as suitcases, eyeglasses and shoes that belonged to Auschwitz deportees will be on display along with concrete posts from a fence at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, fragments of original prisoners’ barracks from the Auschwitz III-Monowitz Camp — and the desk and other possessions of the first, and the longest Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss.
The Auschwitz exhibition portrays the dark reality of the notorious camp, which remains a universal symbol of the Nazi horror and forces its viewers to dig into how Auschwitz and its role in the Holocaust has determined present worldviews and the responsibility to keep such evil from ever resurfacing, according to museum officials.
The West Coast debut of the 12,500 sq. ft. exhibition is the first of three final North American stops. It is twice the size of past special exhibits at the museum.
“Almost two million people a year come to Auschwitz to witness what we call the epicenter of death, the most sacred and anti-sacred place on Earth, the capital of evil with a capital E and the largest Jewish cemetery in the world,” said Michael Berenbaum, a rabbi and director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at the American Jewish University. “(It) was decided it was not only time to bring people to Auschwitz, but to bring Auschwitz to people.”
Berenbaum said Auschwitz should be long ago, ancient history and far away, something that bears little resemblance to the elements of the world in which we live.
“But hatred, racism, antisemitism, systematic state-sponsored evil, crimes against humanity are not long ago and not far away,” he said. “They sadly characterize the world in which you and I live.”