By SUZANNE MOORE
Features Editor
May 07, 2008 04:00 am
—
PLATTSBURGH -- Hermann Gruenwald can't change the past.
He can't bring back his father, Ignatz; his mother, Blanka, both victims of the Holocaust along with 6 million other Jews.
The Montreal man will never forget his eldest sister's first baby, a little girl who was coldly, deliberately murdered by the very doctor who had just moments before helped her into the world.
Gruenwald, 83, can no more erase the memories of the horrors he witnessed than he can scrub away the string of numbers on his left arm.
"But I can tell my story," the Montreal man told the students in the Plattsburgh High School auditorium.
A SINGLE STALK
Gruenwald was 18 when he and his family were transported from their little Hungarian village to Birkenau, the antechamber to Auschwitz, in 1944.
As his flesh was marred with the tattooist's ink, "I cried like a baby," he said. "To me, I became an animal."
The man who held the needle told him to stop crying and instead to consider his good fortune.
"People who didn't get the number ended up in the crematorium," Gruenwald said.
That was a lesson he built upon in the days to come: Sift through the horrific to find some hope.
Even when the harvesters move through a field of grain, he remembered, at least one stalk is left standing. Somehow, that image gave him strength.
"There's no explaining why one survived and one died in the camp," Gruenwald said.
At Auschwitz, he saw many die.
Luck gave him a privileged job in the kitchen, where he became an observer. The hangings took place within Gruenwald's sight there; he saw groups of women taken for human experimentation and then brought back, dead, on stretchers.
He knew when a transport was due out, for "we were the ones who prepared the food to camouflage" its destination of death.
"There was nothing I could do about it."
RISING ABOVE
But he could -- and did -- steal food and medicine for others.
"There were hidden feats of compassion on a daily basis," he said of the underground movement there. "It was our way to feel human in a world that made no sense."
Gruenwald tells his story in "After Auschwitz: One Man's Story," through author Bryan Demchinsky -- including the death march from Auschwitz to Mauthausen and then Gusen II, where the life expectancy was about six weeks and starvation nearly did him in.
On May 7, 1945, American forces liberated the camp. From then on, Gruenwald only looked forward.
"When a catastrophe of this kind occurs, and we survive it," he said, "we have to start on positive thinking.
"Otherwise, you're going to destroy yourself."
A LUCKY MAN
Gruenwald describes himself as a lucky, lucky man, and there's no ironic twist in his tone.
Not only did he survive the Holocaust, so, too, did his four siblings.
Escaping from behind the Iron Curtain, he and his wife, Eva, came to Canada in 1950. From a floor sweeper, he eventually became the largest manufacturer of intimate apparel in Canada. More recently, his passion has been real estate.
"I worked very, very hard," he said. "I met the right people, who gave me the right advice.
"I have no intention to retire," he chuckled.
In 2003, Gruenwald returned to Auschwitz. Last week, as part of Holocaust memorial events hosted by Plattsburgh State, he showed a DVD of that visit at the college and also at PHS, where the students fell silent as he told how his family was separated, how his sister's only wish was to see the face of her newborn daughter before she was taken from her.
The students laughed as the Gruenwald on the screen joked with the woman who collected his admission for visiting the camp.
"When I came here the first time, it was free -- I didn't have to pay," he told her.
EYE WITNESS
Returning to Auschwitz rolled back time.
"Nothing changed. I felt like I left yesterday."
Only at one spot did emotion threaten Gruenwald's sense of calm as he toured the grounds with his granddaughter.
"When I went to the crematorium," he said.
In those halcyon days before the war, young Gruenwald had been a mischievous boy.
"My mother was continually worried about me," he said.
Now, he looked skyward and spoke to her.
"I said, I hope you see you had nothing to worry about.'"
After 150 years, you become a statistic, Gruenwald is wont to say.
"We're reaching almost half of the 150 years."
He feels it is his responsibility to make Hitler's extermination of the Jews real for the younger generations.
"I always tell my students, Look at me well, and when people ask you do you believe the Holocaust happened?
"Say, Yes, I met somebody who was there."'
smoore@pressrepublican.com
smoore@pressrepublican.com
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