Arnold Friedman Arnold Friedman is a survivor.

As a teenage Jew in Europe, he survived the Holocaust, and he related the story of that harrowing experience to an audience of about 100 last Thursday at the Albion — Bolton branch at the Caledon Public Library.

Born in 1928 in Chudlovo, Friedman’s family was spared many of the early ravages of the Nazis’ efforts to remove the Jews of Europe. But it couldn’t last, and by the time the Nazis were defeated, his parents and two younger sisters were dead.

Setting the stage of his story was complicated by the political fluctuations that went on in Europe during the 20th century. Citing the example of the town in which he was born, he said it was part of Austria-Hungary when his father was born, Czechoslovakia when he entered the world in 1928, Hungary when his family was deported to Poland and Ukraine after the war.

Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, and made deals with Rumania, Hungary and Italy. Hungary ended up getting parts of Czechoslovakia, including Chudlovo, and the authorities there took it easy on Jews until 1943.

That was not the case for Jews in Poland, who’s suffering started in ‘39. They were identified, forced to wear yellow stars, making them “easy prey to anybody on the street.”

“There was no shame in killing a Jew and taking his property,” he added. “It was all free for the taking.”

Jews in Hungary weren’t aware of what was going on in Poland, although they were forced to wear the yellow star, and men were taken for slave labour for the Hungarian army. Those men, including Friedman’s father, were put to work in forests in Poland, building roads leading to Russia.

Friedman said his father was demobilized in 1942, when he was 42, and he came home with horror stories about what was going on in Poland. But the community didn’t believe him, claiming he was mad.

Things started tightening for the Hungarian Jews in 1943, as more of the German laws were imposed on them.

In 1944, indications were that Germany was losing the war, and the wrath was being aimed at the Jews of Hungary

In March of that year, with Easter coinciding with Passover, Friedman said there were 52 Jewish families in Chudlovo attending synagogue when the police came in and announced everyone was under arrest. They were deemed aliens, and not trustworthy. But having lived in the village for hundreds of years (Chudlovo said his grandfather had been village sheriff for a time), the Jews were still treated with more consideration than would have been the case elsewhere. They were allowed to go home for seder, and told to report the next day.

But Friedman said he had other ideas.

“Fifteen-year-old kids don’t like police orders,” he observed, adding he and a friend decided to run away.

As well, he recalled his father waking up in the middle of the night screaming, realizing he could see what was coming, with his family ending up like the Jews in Poland. His mother had said a neighbour had offered to take care of the two young daughters, but his father rejected that.

“Let us all go to our deaths together,” Friedman recalled his father saying.

“I didn’t like that idea,” he added, as he and his friend headed to the nearby city. They found a public kitchen in a Jewish Community Centre, where they stayed for two weeks. At that point, Friedman said he had had a change of heart, and decided to join his family. There was a brick factory in the ghetto, where each family was allocated a place, but he learned he had missed his family by about four hours.

There were transport trains leaving daily, and Friedman was able to get himself on one, riding a cattle car, with straw on the floor, a barrel of water and half a barrel to be used as a latrine. The weather was also warm, being mid-May. “The stench was terrible,” he said.

Their destination was Auschwitz.

They were greeted by uniformed prisoners, with some SS men on hand. The prisoners were segregated, and Friedman found himself among the able-bodied men who were fit for work.

They were taken about 200 metres from the train station to the front of a building, made to strip and put their clothes in neat piles, and go into showers. When they emerged, they had their hair cut off. Friedman said those who complained “got a kick in the gut (and) a slap in the face.

He also recalled the prisoners greeting the trains were generally the same nationality as the passengers. While the arriving prisoners were not told they were in a liquidation camp, Friedman said those who complained were told “your damned lucky you’re not going up the chimney.”

Friedman added at the time, he had no idea what that meant.

He said the prisoners were issued uniforms and marched into compounds surrounded by electrical wires. As conditions grew worse, some of the prisoners committed suicide by electrocuting themselves on those wires.

Friedman said kids aged 13 to 16 were sent into a separate barracks. There were about 5,000 of them, and they were counted every morning, and then were fed. Meals consisted of a chunk of bread, with the occasional piece of fish cake or salami, depending on how many horses had been killed in bombings. “On a good day, we got some good soup with horse neat,” he commented.

Friedman said he arrived at Auschwitz in June, but there was nothing for him and the other youths to do until August and Rosh Hashanah. Around that time, the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele had the kids lined up to be counted, which was unusual. Friedman recalled seeing Mengele casually putting a cigarette in a holder and picking out kids at random and having them marched away. He added a couple of days later a man sweeping the street pointed to a plume of smoke, telling him that was his friends. On a bad day, the smoke would be blown into the barracks. “You could smell the burning flesh,” he said.

At that time, 12-car trains were arriving at Auschwitz all the time, with about 100 people per car. From each train, there would be about 100 men and 40 to 50 women who would be deemed fit for labour. The rest were “marched out to where we knew what was happening to them, but there was nothing we could do.”

Over the years, there has been criticism of the Jews for not showing more resistance to what was happening to them at the time. But Friedman pointed out there wasn’t a lot they could have done. They were surrounded, and since they weren’t getting much nourishment, they didn’t have the energy for serious fighting. As well, those who got away wouldn’t have been much better off. They were in Poland, dealing with a foreign language. And the Poles in the area would have been glad to turn in run-aways.

He also said it’s hard to describe what it’s like to watch people who don’t know where they’re heading being marched to the gas chambers.

Yom Kippur came days after Rosh Hashanah. That is the day when Jews ask for God’s forgiveness. “I think God should have asked us for forgiveness, because we weren’t there by choice,” Friedman observed.

In keeping with the tradition, the youths fasted that day, until about 10 a.m., when they learned that Mengele was going to be making more selections. They gulped down all the food they could find in order to look healthy.

Again, Mengele casually picked people to be marched out, and one of those called back, “Remember the day we died.”

Five days after that was a bad time, Friedman recalled.

“Dr. Mengele decided to make more sacrifices to his favourite god,” he said. “I don’t know who that was.”

Friedman said it apparently developed that they were no longer needed, so they were marched to the rear of the barracks. They were required to walk next to a poll with marker on it, and everyone knew what might happen to those who were too short. His lack of height meant he had a problem

“How to grow fast,” Friedman wondered. “I haven’t learned it yet.”

He got out of that situation by constantly slipping back in the line, then jumping into a group of tall kids and standing on a pile of bricks.

“Nobody survived by wits,” he observed. “It was just a moment. You survived and that’s it.”

“I can’t thank God for surviving without blaming Him for those who didn’t,” he added.

Friedman recalled a time early in October when he and his companions climbed poles in their barracks and watched the Germans shooting prisoners after they had been disarmed.

He added he thinks this was around the time Mengele made his escape to Argentina.

The youngsters were given tattooed numbers, making them part of the “inventory.”

It was known that the Russian armies were on the way, and that the camp was to be liquidated. Friedman said the young prisoners were marched out of the camp Jan. 17, 1945. He remembered having a piece of bread and some margarine for the road, which he held under his armpit to keep warm. He also recalled seeing the side of the road littered with the bodies of women, who had been marched out ahead of them. It was bitterly cold, and Friedman said hearing the crack of snow under his feet in winter always brings the memory back for him.

By 4 a.m., he got out of the line to try and smear the margarine on his piece of bread, and suddenly realized there was a gun pointed at his neck. The guard thought he had doubled over, and was ready to put him out of his misery.

The prisoners were eventually loaded on a coal train, and Friedman recalled piling up bodies so they would have something to sit on in the cold cars. They were taken to a Russian prisoner camp which was infected with typhoid fever, and some of Friedman’s group caught it.

They were then taken to Dachau concentration camp. By this point, some of the prisoners were too weak to get out of bed, and that meant starvation, because those who brought food to the barracks wouldn’t go in because of the typhoid.

By early April, the Russians had taken Auschwitz, and with the Americans coming from the other direction, the German guards started negotiating with the Red Cross to be allowed to surrender to them. “We’re standing like a bunch of goats,” Friedman said, adding it was raining, miserable and machine guns were pointed at them. He also said the SS had told them if they couldn’t reach a deal with the Americans, the prisoners would be shot. Friedman said his response was to lie down, and using a rock for a pillow, he went to sleep. When he woke up, the SS and Red Cross were gone and they had been abandoned.

The prisoners dispersed, with Friedman being part of a group of seven or eight. They took shelter in a haystack, keeping on guard because the armies were firing. Friedman said he woke up when American tanks arrived. Jeeps picked them up. “They knew that I needed help,” he said.

Friedman said he spent some time at a rehabilitation facility that had been used as a resort for the military elite.

He said he was picked up in Prague and made it to Scotland with help from the English Jewish Congress. There, he was given a passport and someone suggested he travel to Canada.

“It’s far away from Europe, and I said ‘that’s good,’” he said

Friedman wasn’t sure what the moral to his story was.

“The world has gone from bad to worse,” he observed. “Holocaust is not a Jewish issue, it’s a Jewish tragedy.”

He added humanity is adrift, with society not being as benign as it likes to think it is. He pointed out no one went to war with Germany over human rights issues.

Friedman added none of the Holocaust survivors who made it to Canada have been a burden on society, and he wondered if things would have been different if Canada or the allies had gone to war sooner.

“I don’t know what I would say to Mackenzie King if I met him,” he remarked. “I don’t know what I would say to Hitler if met him.”

“God is a creator of that which is beyond the limits of our mind,” he concluded. “He gave us the world and we must manage it.”