|
Holocaust survivor recalls Auschwitz
A capacity crowd gathered Monday night in Centennial Hall to hear Holocaust survivor Henry Ortelt recount his story of survival amid the death and ruin of Auschwitz. Ortelt was introduced by SCSU professor Courtney Hill-Thornquist, who read a short poem written by a Jewish poet about how people should remember what happened to the Jews of Europe under Hitler's rule.
Speaking with a slight accent, Ortelt, who drove up from his home in St. Paul, spoke in front of a large map of occupied Europe.
The Holocaust was based on one four-letter word: hate. "This is the root of all killings," Ortelt said, describing several other examples of lesser-known genocide in the past century.
Whenever this is done, it's usually done in the name of God, and on that point, Ortelt was reflective and honest. "I'm not fanatically religious, in fact, fanatics for almost anything scare me. But if my God commanded me to kill, I would think I have the wrong God."
Henry Ortelt is Jewish. Born in Berlin in 1921, he was 12-years-old when Adolf Hitler came to power. With an unemployment rate of 40 percent, the people were desperate for a solution, and many thought they had found it in Hitler. The Versailles Treaty, which was meant to curb Germany's "history of aggression," banned all manufacturing of weapons and caused widespread economic ruin.
In times of hardship, people needed a scapegoat, and Hitler provided them one in Jews. He blamed them for losing the war and for making the Versailles Treaty. People started to believe this, and Ortelt recited the old phrase "a lie repeated often enough will be believed."
Ortelt recalled the first time he realized that the Nazis may not have had his best interest in mind. Walking down the street with his mother, they came across a group of Brownshirts (an early term for Nazi party members) marching down the street in uniform. The song they sang had the refrain "Once the blood from the Jews squirts from out knives, everything will be twice as well." Ortelt was horrified when he heard this, and his mother had to calm him down. Eventually, hearing the song everywhere, he stopped paying attention.
As time went on, Ortelt and the other Jews in Germany found themselves systematically degraded. Ortelt was kicked out of school for no reason other than being Jewish, and was made a benchwarmer on the soccer team he once captained. When he asked why this was so, he was told, "We don't want any damned Jews on our team!"
With no school and his civil liberties revoked to the point where he couldn't leave his home for leisure time, he found work as an apprentice making fine furniture.
Like all Jews in Germany, Ortelt was forced to wear a yellow Star of David on his clothing. He had an example of this star, which said "Jude," the German word for "Jew" on the inside part of the star. By this time, Jews were disappearing left and right, and all of his friends had been sent away. World War II had started, and efforts on the part of the Nazis to get rid of the Jews went into full swing. By 1943, 90 percent of Europe's Jews had been "evacuated."
Ortelt was first shipped to Terieziensdadt concentration camp, which had a reputation of being a "mild camp," a title which didn't sit well with Ortelt. He went on to describe how out of 15,000 children brought to the camp, less than 100 walked away. The problems these inmates faced at the camps other than death being a few feet away, were food poisoning, lice, fleas and never being clean: "Everyone was dirty."
By making furniture, Ortelt proved himself useful in the camp and was left to work. But in October 1944, he was herded into a cattle car with the other prisoners and taken to Auschwitz. It was a two-and-a-half day trip, with no food or water provided by the guards. Auschwitz-Bierkenau was the largest of the concentration camps. It was a combination death camp / work camp, like "the Twin Cities of concentration camps," Ortelt said.
"I don't want to kid you. The only way out of here is through the chimney," the SS Commandant told the prisoners upon their arrival. Over every doorway, there was iron-work containing the phrase "Arbeit Macht Frei," or "Work Makes You Free." Ortelt had a rather humorous comment about these signs that reflected the bitter humor that laced his presentation: "The "B" in those signs is upside down. These guys are brilliant!"
At Auschwitz, 500,000 children were killed because, in Ortelt's words, "they were guilty of the inexcusable crime of allowing themselves to be born to Jewish parents." Once the useful had been separated from those bound for the gas chambers they were given numbers. Henry Ortelt's number is "B-11291," and it is still on his arm in small letters. Once numbers had been assigned, people no longer had names. "It was the final act of dehumanization," Ortelt said.
In early 1945, with the Russians closing in on the camp, Ortelt and other prisoners marched four days and nights to the Flossenburg concentration camp. By the middle of April, the sounds of war grew closer, and the prisoners were forced to march again. There were 16,000 prisoners, and Ortelt was in the first marching column. If a man fell down or could not walk anymore, he was shot by an SS guard and left for dead. Fortunately, elements from the American Third Armored Division startled the SS guards one day and they all fled, leaving the prisoners to be liberated. Weighing 82 pounds at the time of his liberation, Ortelt witnessed what happened to the people who could not control themselves with what was given to them. Being starved for so long, their bodies were not used to rich food, and they died an excruciating death as a result.
Ortelt married after the war and came to America, in the years following.
The Holocaust happened, according to Ortelt, because of hate. "Hate is the worst four-letter word of all." With that, he took questions from the audience. He finally ended by saying how his brother and he were the only ones left alive in his family after the war, and how he was liberated on April 23rd - his mother's birthday.
|
|
|
|
Privacy Policy Network Advertising Article Syndication
|
|
