Nativity School students Brett Griffin and Alex Martinez flank Holocaust survivor Alter Weiner.
St. Andrew Nativity School photo
“I have hands, like your hands,” the aging man told the fresh-faced students. “There was no friendly handshake, no compassionate touch. For months I did not feel the touch of another human being except the slap of the guard across the face. I have ears, like your ears. I did not hear the pleasure of music, a kind word from another… You cannot imagine how dehumanizing this was…the day I entered the concentration camp, they took away my name and gave me a number, 64735.”
Addressing students at St. Andrew Nativity School in Portland, Holocaust survivor Alter Weiner wove stories of his teenage years. He looked back on his response to atrocity. To many adults World War II horrors Weiner endured and witnessed may seem familiar and dulled. For those youths with rapt faces, the tales revived the shocking and disgusting nature of one of humanity’s most shameful episodes.
When he was 13, on September 11, 1939, Weiner’s father was shot and dumped into a mass grave. The boy was snatched from his house by Nazi soldiers two years later. After four years of brutality in Germany’s and Poland’s concentration camps, he returned to his hometown of Chraznow, Poland to discover that 123 relatives from his extended family would never return from the murderous Nazi machine: only five extended family members survived the war.
“The guard at…camp was a Sadist,” explained Weiner. “This means that he enjoyed watching other people in pain.” At this guard’s command, Weiner spent an entire sleepless winter night forced under a cold shower with a small group of prisoners. A common criminal in Germany before the war, the guard watched and laughed: more than one prisoner died because of the man’s terrorizing pleasure.
Each prisoner in the labor camps was required to wear a symbol that designated his or her identity, the Catholic school students learned. Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Catholics, among others, were persecuted. Weiner emphasized that Hitler ordered that distinctions be made between people, creating fear and mistrust, upon which his orders of hatred and violence were built.
Despite Weiner’s incredible hardships, one experience gave him a reason to hope. At a factory that was sharply split between German women and camp prisoners, signs were posted informing the women of “dire consequences” — execution— if the women spoke with, made signs to, or even made eye contact with, a prisoner. Slaving at the factory, Weiner noticed one day that a woman secretly and quickly signaled to him to go to a certain spot in the factory. “I knew it had to be something good,” he told the students. Weiner found a way to secretly approach the indicated place; there he found, under a crate, a sandwich made of two slices of white bread and one slice of cheese. Weiner took the sandwich to the lavatory where he could eat it unnoticed. The scenario replayed itself every day for a month.
“I have no measure stick, no way of knowing if that food was what made it possible for me to survive,” Weiner said. “But she gave me hope. She risked her life for me. I don’t know why. To this day, she is my hero.”
Weiner went on to explain how he learned to value each individual, not in terms of the generalizations or labels that we often apply — or see applied — to others, but in a desire to understand each person on his or her own merits.
“Prejudice is senseless,” he said many times. “I experienced evil at the hand of a German guard, and a German lady was my hope. Both were Germans. Each was an individual.”
