A story of sole survival

PAT JOHNSON

At six a.m., on the third Wednesday in April of 1944, young David Ehrlich heard a knock on the door of the cramped home in Romania where three generations of his family slept. The family had 30 minutes to collect a small clutch of possessions and join the town’s other Jews in the synagogue.

“It was a frightening scene, as everybody we knew was there and everyone had worried looks on their faces,” Ehrlich recounted at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s commemoration of Yom Hashoah this year. “We did not know where they would take us.”

He and his family were sent to a local farm, along with the town’s other Jews who had not gone into hiding, joined the partisans or been sent to work for the Germans on the Eastern Front. The farm was surrounded by barbed wire to form a rural ghetto.

“Soon committees were formed; the doctors and nurses turned the farmhouse into a hospital,” said Ehrlich. “All the food was gathered and a community kitchen was established so that food was equally distributed. Older people were allowed to use the hayloft for sleeping. The rest of us spent the nights under the skies and most of the time it was raining. We spent some four weeks there under miserable conditions.

“I was hoping for the train to come, as I thought nothing could be worse than this,” he recalled.

The trains did come. Ehrlich’s family and the others were crammed into boxcars for a 36-hour ride in stifling, unsanitary, inhuman conditions. When the journey ended, at Auschwitz, there was a quick process of selection.

“The place was lit up like a stage,” he said. “Barbed wire was as far as the eyes could see in all directions. There were only about three German soldiers, smartly dressed with shiny boots and pressed trousers. They were smoking and conversing with laughter. Most of the work on our arrival in Auschwitz was done by prisoners in uniform.” A German, who Ehrlich would later realize was Joseph Mengele, oversaw the next step.

“The man with the stick in his hand decided who was going to live and who was going to die,” Ehrlich said. “No questions asked. One quick look. If he thought you could work, you were selected to live. If not, you went to the other side. My mother, father, grandmother and younger brother went to the other side. My two brothers and I went to the showers. We made it.”

The significance of the selection was not clear until after Ehrlich and his brothers emerged from the showers. “The man who gave me my uniform asked me whether I had said goodbye to my family. ‘Why should I? I will see them tomorrow,’ I said. I had visions that all of us men would go to work and my mom would stay home and cook for us. He took me to the window and showed me the chimneys and explained that, while we were taking a shower, my family had been gassed and, as we spoke, they were being cremated.”

Most of the prisoners who passed the selection were sent to factories, mines and farms, Ehrlich said. He remained in Auschwitz, assigned to work in a furniture factory. His two brothers were shipped elsewhere. Later, after Ehrlich had been forced on a death march from Auschwitz to Melk in the face of Allied advances, he found out that his brothers had both been there, too, but had recently died.

“One was shot and the other was taken to the ‘hospital,’ which was nothing but a façade,” said Ehrlich. “No doctors, no medication. They just gave lethal injections.”

As the Russians advanced further, Ehrlich and his remaining fellow prisoners were moved again, in another horrific death march. Finally, the Nazi regime was in its final throes. In early April, the commandant of Ehrlich’s final camp came over the loudspeakers to say that he had received orders from Berlin to march all the prisoners into a tunnel, seal the entrance and blow it up. The commandant said this would be the first time in his service to the Third Reich that he disobeyed an order. The officer told the inmates that the Americans would soon be there to liberate them and that he would be replacing the SS guards with local police.

“Two days later, when we sat around in the sun, we heard a noise that only a tank would make on cobblestones,” Ehrlich recalled. “We all rushed to the gate and saw this huge tank with a tiny U.S. flag on it approaching the camp. To us, the tiny U.S. flag was huge. The guards opened the gate, but the tank did not use the gate. Instead, it simply drove over the barbed wire and destroyed it in the process. That was a symbolic action to tell us that it was all over.”

In the ensuing weeks, Ehrlich regained some weight, going from 80 to 125 pounds with the help of doctors, nurses and dieticians brought in by the Allies. Though the family had made a commitment that, after the war, they would meet again in their hometown of Bistrita, in the province of Transylvania, Ehrlich knew by the time of liberation that he was the only one left to go home.

“Our communities were destroyed. Our families were uprooted and very few returned. We survived the Holocaust but the tough part was still to come.”

By the time Ehrlich was well enough to consider where he would begin a new life in the absence of everything he had known, Soviet forces were entrenched in Romania and, Ehrlich said, he “had no desire to start a new life under communism.”

In January of 1946, he applied to go to Canada. “Canadian Jewish Congress had received entry permits for 1,000 Holocaust survivors and I was one of the successful applicants,” he said.

Ehrlich’s story was at the centre of a deeply moving ceremony on April 11 that drew hundreds and left many people standing throughout the auditorium at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. Youth singers participated in the event, along with Claire Klein Osipov, who sang in Yiddish, and Cantor Michael Zoosman, a member of the third generation, who chanted El Maleh Rachamim. Wendy Bross Stuart, who directed the evening, accompanied on piano, and Connie Gitlin played clarinet. Chaim Kornfeld recited Kaddish.

Assisted by members of the second and third generations, six survivors – Ehrlich, Robert Krell, Susie Micner, Chaim Micner, Bronia Sonnenschein and Robbie Waisman – lit six candles of remembrance.

The evening ended with the traditional singing of “Zog Nit Keynmol,” the “Partisan Song,” with its defiant culmination: “Mir zaynen do!,” “We are here!”

Ethel Kofsky, who organized the event with Cathy Golden and Rome Fox, all members of the second generation, spoke about the challenges of being raised by survivors.

“As a child of survivors, one of the legacies of the Holocaust that speaks to me is to bear witness to my parents’ experiences. As time passes and fewer firsthand witnesses to the atrocities can speak their truths, it is imperative that we keep their voices and their memories alive,” Kofsky said. “The children, grandchildren and future generations of survivors are proof that our parents did not only survive, but – against all odds – thrived in their chosen communities. They taught us to teach, to contribute and to speak out against injustice wherever it occurs. They made the journey from oppression to survival and have shown us what true endurance really is.”

Pat Johnson is, among other things, director of programs for Hillel in British Columbia.

^TOP