HIFA, Israel (AP) — Naftali Furst will never forget his first sight of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on Nov. 3, 1944. He was 12 years old.
SS soldiers opened the door of the cattle cart, where he entered with his mother, father, brother and more than 80 others. He remembers the tall chimneys of the cemetery, the flames roaring from above.
There were dogs and officers shouting in German “Out out, out out!” Forcing people to jump the infamous ramp where Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele separated children from their parents.
The first, now 92, is one in one. The decline in the number of Holocaust survivors The world is able to share first-person accounts of the horrors they endured on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis’ most infamous death camp. Returning to Auschwitz for the first. Annually On this occasion, his fourth visit to the camp.
Every time he returns, he thinks of those first moments there.
“We knew we were approaching certain death,” he said earlier this month from his home in the northern Israeli city of Haifa. “In Slovakia, we knew that people who went to Poland didn’t come back.”
Shocks of fate
Fürst and his family arrived at the gates of Auschwitz on November 3, 1943 – the day after Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler ordered the gas chambers to cease use before their demolition, as Soviet troops approached. The order meant that his family was not killed immediately. It was one of the many small parts of luck and coincidence that allowed Frost to survive.
“For 60 years, I haven’t spoken about the Holocaust, for 60 years I haven’t spoken a word of German, even though it’s my mother tongue,” Fürst said.
In 2005, he was invited to participate in a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, where he was liberated on 11 April 1944 after being transferred from Auschwitz. He realized that there were very few Holocaust survivors who could give first-person accounts, and decided to throw himself into memorial work. This will be his fourth visit to an event in Auschwitz, having also met Pope Francis there in 2016.
There were about 6 million European Jews. Killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust – The mass killing of Jews and other groups before and during World War II. Soviet Red Army troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945, and the day became known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. An estimated 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, died at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
According to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, only 220,000 Holocaust survivors are alive, and more than 20 percent are over 90.
Meeting place after the battle
Fürst, originally from Bratislava, then part of Czechoslovakia, was only 6 years old when the Nazis began implementing measures against the country’s Jews.
He spent the ages of 9 to 12 in four different concentration camps, including Auschwitz. His parents had planned to jump off a cattle car on the way to the camp, but the people were packed so tightly that they could not reach the gate.
His father instructed the whole family, no matter what, to meet at 11 Šulekova Street in Bratislava after the war. Furst and his brother were separated from their mother. After the numbers were tattooed on his arms, they were also taken from his father. They lived in Block 29 without many other children. As the Soviet army closed in on the area, so close they could hear the roar of tanks, Fürst and his brother Shmuel were forced to embark on a perilous trek to Buchenwald, three days of cold and snow. I marched. Anyone who stayed behind was shot.
“We had to prove our will to survive, take another step and another step and keep moving forward,” he said. Many gave up hunger, thirst and desire to end the cold, and sat there, where they were shot by the guards.
“We had this commandment from my father: ‘You must adapt and survive, and even if you suffer, you must come back,'” recalled Furst.
Furst and his brother survived the march, and boarded an open car train in the snow, but were separated at the next camp. When Fürst was freed from Buchenwald, captured in a famous photo featuring Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel in bunk beds, he believed he was alone in the world.
But within months, as directed by Furst’s father, the four family members were reunited at an address they remembered, the home of family friends. The rest of his family – grandparents, aunts, uncles, were all killed. His family later moved to Israel, where he married, had a daughter, four grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren, with another on the way.
‘We could not imagine this tragedy’
On October 7, 2023, Furst woke up to a Hamas attack on southern Israel, and immediately thought of his granddaughter, Mika Peleg, and her husband, and their 2-year-old son, who Kufar AzzaA kibbutz on the border with Gaza where hundreds of people were killed or kidnapped.
No one in the family could be contacted.
“It got worse all day, we couldn’t get any information on what was going on with them,” First said. “We saw horrors, that we couldn’t even imagine this kind of horror happening in 2023, 80 years after the Holocaust.”
At midnight on October 7, Peleg’s neighbors sent word that the family had survived. They spent about 20 hours locked in their safe room with no food or ability to communicate. Her husband’s parents, both of whom lived in Kafr Azza, were killed.
Despite its close connection, comparisons between October 7 and the Holocaust make Furst uncomfortable.
“It’s horrible and horrible and a disaster, and it’s hard to explain, but it’s not the Holocaust,” he said. As terrifying as the Hamas attack was to her granddaughter and others, she said, the Holocaust was a multi-year “industry of death” with massive infrastructure and campuses that housed 10,000 people a day for months at a time. could kill
Furst, who previously worked on coexistence between Jews and Arabs, said his heart also goes out to the Palestinians in Gaza, though he believes Israel needs to respond militarily. “I feel the pain of everyone who is suffering everywhere in the world, because I think I know what suffering is,” he said.
Fürst knows that he is one of the few Holocaust survivors still able to travel to Auschwitz, so it is important for him to be there for the 80th anniversary.
These days, he’s telling his story as often as he can, appearing in documentaries and films, serving as president of the Buchenwald Prisoners’ Association and a memorial at the Serd concentration camp in Slovakia. Working to make a sculpture.
He said he felt a responsibility to speak for the millions of people who were killed, and that people could relate to one person’s story more than the difficult number of 6 million deaths.
“Every time I finish, I tell young people, the fact that you can see the living testimony (of Holocaust survivors) puts more demands on you than someone who didn’t: you continue to tell it. Take the responsibility of keeping it on your shoulders.”
