Tag: David Ehrlich

Survivor shares story

Holocaust survivor David Ehrlich speaks on Jan. 25. (photo by Pat Johnson)

David Ehrlich grew up in a small city in Hungary, sleeping in the kitchen of the family’s three-room house – “not three bedrooms, God forbid, three rooms” – and it was through the kitchen curtains early one morning that he saw three bayonets before he heard a knock at the door.

“I opened the door, they came into the kitchen and they said to me in German – there were two Hungarian gendarmes and one German soldier or officer or whoever he was – ‘I want you to bring in the family into the kitchen.’”

Young David gathered his parents, sister, three brothers and grandmother and they assembled in the kitchen, where they were told to be on the street in 30 minutes to prepare for deportation to a work camp.

Ehrlich shared his story Jan. 25 at a commemoration marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day (which was Jan. 27). The afternoon event, which took place at the University of British Columbia, was presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Hillel BC, the department of Central, Eastern and Northern European studies at UBC (CENES) and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, with support from the Akselrod family in memory of Ben Akselrod.

After two weeks in a makeshift ghetto on a local farm, the 7,000 Jews were forced onto trains, said Ehrlich. Seventy people were pushed into each car.

“These were not cattle cars,” he clarified. “I wish they had been cattle cars because [cattle cars] are ventilated.” There was one little hole at the top of the car, covered with barbed wire, and a child would occasionally be lifted up to look out to see if the signs outside were in Hungarian, German or Polish.

“But, soon enough, the train stopped,” he said. “They opened up the door … and there were some signs and some smells and some visions that I’ll never forget as long as I live. The place had electric lights … barbed wire all over in all directions.

“Little people – I thought they were little, but they were prisoners – came up to the train and said leave everything there, stand in line, five abreast. And we did that and walked over to this man with a stick in his hand and he was doing the selection. Who is going to live, who is going to die.… They played God. About 10 minutes or so later, we were separated from our family.”

While he was receiving his uniform, Ehrlich got his first lesson in what this place – Auschwitz – was all about.

“Did you say goodbye to your family?” the man asked Ehrlich.

“I said, why should I? I’m going to see them probably this afternoon. He said, while you were taking a shower, your family was gassed and, while we talk here, their bodies are probably being burned in the crematorium.”

Ehrlich’s brothers were almost immediately sent on to Melk, a sub-camp of Mauthausen, in Austria.

Because Hungarian Jews were among the last to be deported to the camps, the Soviet army was already advancing from the east by the time Ehrlich arrived at Auschwitz and the prisoners were sent on a death march westward. He, too, ended up in Melk and found someone from his hometown who knew the fate of his brothers. They had been sent to the hospital a few days earlier. Ehrlich knew that the hospital was a farce and that being sent there meant certain death.

“That was probably my lowest point in the whole deal because I always felt that I’d meet up with my brothers someplace,” he said. “I did, only a week too late.”

As the Russians kept on moving westward, the Nazis marched Ehrlich and the others further, this time to Ebensee, Austria.

“One day – it was a nice sunny day – we went outside and the loudspeaker came on and the president of the camp said, I’ve got good news for you. I have received orders from the Reich that we are to take you into the mine and blow it up with you in it. But I’m not going to do that – that’s the good news. For the first time since I’m in the services of the Third Reich, I’m going to disobey this order.”

He told the prisoners that they were free. The next day, they heard tanks on the cobblestone streets.

“And a guy that was probably 20 years old – like a kid, he looked like me – got out of the manhole and said to us in Yiddish, ‘Ich bin ein Amerikaner Jude,’ ‘I am an American Jew.’”

After liquids, then vitamins, eventually solids, Ehrlich regained some of his health. After two months, he still weighed less than 100 pounds, but he was ready to go home.

“But going home for Holocaust survivors, whether it was to France or to Germany or to Poland, it was the same thing,” said Ehrlich. “Canadian soldiers, American soldiers came back from the war, they came back to their community, to their parents and to their country. We went back and there was nobody there. My sister [who had been liberated in Lithuania] was there but we lost everybody else.”

Ehrlich wasn’t going to stay behind the Iron Curtain. He and a friend wanted to see Paris, planning eventually to head for pre-state Israel.

“But, while we were waiting in Paris, there were rumours that Canada was looking for orphans to go to Canada,” he said. “I went to work as soon as I came to Canada. I was going on 19. I went to work and I’ve been paying taxes ever since.”

The story has a good ending, Ehrlich told his audience.

“I married a wonderful girl – she’s right here, the little grey-haired girl – 65 years ago and we’re still together and we brought up three wonderful sons.”

Rabbi Philip Bregman told the survivors: “We are tremendously aware of how precious you people are who lit these candles and came in today as personal witness.”

The commemoration also featured Prof. Uma Kumar, of CENES, who said the Holocaust is a contemporary issue because antisemitism is a contemporary issue. “For this reason,” she said, “it is everyone’s duty to reflect on what happened.”

Survivor’s talk inspires

“There are as many Holocaust stories as there are Holocaust survivors,” said David Ehrlich, a survivor outreach speaker of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, to open his afternoon talk at Langara College. On Oct. 31, a class of 20 students and several faculty members and guests heard Ehrlich – a Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz who immigrated to Canada via Paris in the late 1940s – tell his personal story.

This class is part of a program called Writing Lives: The Holocaust Survivor Memoir Project. In the first term, its students produce research papers on prewar European Jewish communities like the one that Ehrlich called home; in the second term, they will interview survivor-partners and together write memoirs of the survivors’ experiences.

Ehrlich is an evocative speaker. He spoke lovingly of his family home in Transylvania (now part of Romania). “We had a three-room home, and we were middle-class. But we had no running water and no electricity, not for another 20 years,” he said. “Kids don’t know any better. I thought that we had it well: chicken on Friday night, bread on the table, it was wonderful!”

But he also told of his experience with antisemitic violence, the hard choices made by families who tried to avoid a Nazi roundup, and life in Auschwitz. He silenced the room when he spoke of stepping off a train boxcar at Auschwitz: “I’ll never forget the view when the sliding doors opened, or the noise that the doors made,” he said.

The students – who in this term’s research papers attempt to imaginatively reconstruct Jewish life before the Second World War’s devastation – responded with questions about Ehrlich’s journey to Canada. He spoke of the family that he made in Canada: a wife and three sons. He made his story accessible to the audience of all ages.

The students admired Ehrlich and a bond was formed during his talk, which was about an hour long. When he finished speaking, there was a respectful silence, and no student seemed willing to be the first to break it. Teachers from Langara began the question-and-answer session and, once the ice was broken, the students filled the remaining time with questions. Ehrlich in turn shared relevant wisdom for Writing Lives’ participants.

“You are educated and smart,” he told them. “There comes a time where you’ve got to learn to put up with people who are different because you have to get along. Start practising by getting along with your fellow students.”

Indeed, Writing Lives features groups in which students collaborate on research and, ultimately, on memoirs with the course’s survivor-partners. These collaborations require empathy. Ehrlich conducted himself as an exemplar of empathy, stating, “I can’t hold the grandchildren of Nazi-era Germans accountable for the Holocaust,” and the students’ response to his talk suggests that they, too, understand empathy’s importance. The course thus offers an excellent venue for students’ development of collaborative skills and of compassion. It provides a space in which students can grow closer together.

The afternoon also contained humour and reference to contemporary subjects. Ehrlich joked that he was now willing to use various German-made appliances and recalled that the heavy rainfall during a roundup of Hungarian Jews paled in comparison to Vancouver’s weather. Ehrlich also demonstrated strong knowledge of news and politics by interspersing references to American and Canadian current events into his remarks. He shared his general optimism about the post-Holocaust situation, stating, “After three or four generations, the Germans are coming clean; they are behaving like good nations do. It’s the only country in the world where you cannot say that the Holocaust didn’t exist.” He added, “We in Canada are very lucky – multicultural – and there’s no way that one minority group could be persecuted as in the Holocaust.”

His audience appreciated his graceful, optimistic tone. One enthusiastic student baked dozens of cupcakes to celebrate Ehrlich’s recent birthday.

Ehrlich’s talk will guide Writing Lives’ students through the remainder of the program. They will respond to it in one of their weekly written submissions, and the experience of interacting with a Holocaust survivor foreshadows the interviews that they will conduct in early 2018. They could not have asked for a better guide.

William Chernoff is a student in the Writing Lives program. Coordinated by instructor Dr. Rachel Mines, the two-semester program is a partnership between Langara, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and the Azrieli Foundation.