Remembering why ...

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January 26, 2008

Horrors of Auschwitz recalled

By KATHLEEN HARRIS, SUN MEDIA



Kazimierz Albin, who pulled off an incredible escape from Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943, is pictured here at age 85 and in 1944. The Warsaw resident snuck through a basement door and swam through frigid rivers to elude his Nazi captors.
AUSCHWITZ, Poland -- He was among the first to arrive at the death camp, and one of the few to escape alive.

Kazimierz Albin -- Prisoner No. 118 as he came to be known -- was rounded up at age 17 and loaded on a cramped train carrying the first 728 inmates to Auschwitz in January 1940. On the way, they heard whoops of joy from the Germans who received news that France had fallen.

"Our world had collapsed," he recalled in an interview through a Polish translator from his home in Warsaw yesterday.

Arrested for his links to the Nazi resistance movement, Albin survived the selection process because his youth and good health made him "valuable" for forced labour. Soon his days were spent enduring 12 hours of back-breaking work and gruelling drills, and his nights spent sleeping on a hard floor blanketed with a razor-thin mattress.

Fear, cruelty and hunger ruled the daily regime. Those who couldn't keep up with the excruciating work or understand German commands where shot on the spot.

"We quickly realized the objective was not just to have work done -- it was an opportunity to kill because there were more and more arrivals coming," he said.



Ceremonies around the world will mark Holocaust Memorial Day. It was on Jan. 27, 1945, that the Soviet Red Army liberated Auschwitz, a German concentration camp that has become a symbol of evil and genocide as the site where 1.1 million Jews, Poles, Gypsies and others were "exterminated."

They died by starvation, exhaustion, suffocation or in gas chambers, then their corpses were piled up and incinerated in furnaces.

Hundreds attempted to flee the horrors of Auschwitz, but there were only 144 confirmed cases of successful escapes. Albin was one of them.

Surrounded by electric barbed-wire fences, attack dogs and armed SS guards in watchtowers and on patrols, he was among seven prisoners who managed to bust open a basement door and break free in February 1943.

Their wet bodies trembled as they ran and swam through frigid rivers, the roar of sirens and barking guard dogs growing fainter as they fled for their lives.

"There were stars in the sky. It was a beautiful winter night," Albin said. "It was like waking from a dream."

He made it to Krakow and lived under a changed name.

Now 85, Albin vividly remembers details of his incredible escape and the terrible memories of his time at Auschwitz.

Today, the sprawling three-camp compound at Auschwitz is open to visitors, its bleak maze of barbed wire and ominous warning signs still intact and drawing shock and tears more than 60 years later.

Max Eisen of Toronto has made several return trips to this site where his Jewish family was herded like cattle in 1944. By then, Auschwitz was a massive, overcrowded industrial operation and site of mass murder.

Despite SS promises of a family reunion, his mother, two younger brothers and little sister were immediately deemed not "valuable" and selected for extermination. Eisen, a native of Czechoslavakia, was sent to the primitive barracks at Birkenau where he was stripped, shaved and branded prisoner A9892.

He says now he would not have survived a day if it weren't for his father and uncle, who were also kept alive for labour for the time being.

"The sound and noise and smell of this place was right in your face. I could see hundreds of emaciated people behind barbed wire and I had no idea what this was all about," Eisen recalled. "I said, 'There are a lot of convicts here -- what am I doing here?'"

Horrific reality soon set in, and each day became a struggle of physical and psychological survival. Tattooed with a prisoner's number and branded as a Jew, Eisen was the lowest in the camp hierarchy and spent days draining swamps and spreading skin-scorching fertilizer.

"You had to learn the ropes very fast," he said. "You get your slice of bread and you have to make a decision about whether you are going to eat it right away or save some of it for the next day. People would kill for a crumb of bread, the hunger was so terrible. These people were not criminals, but people were starved. I saw the best and the very worst of people there."

Several months later, when his father and uncle taken away for "medical experiments," he was able to say goodbye through a fence in the quarantine cell. He never saw them again.

By January 1945, the Nazis knew the Soviets were advancing and forced prisoners on a "death march." His body, skin and bones infested with lice, Eisen survived a walk of four days and four nights straight.

Surviving Auschwitz was a "miracle;" he was from an extended family of 70 before the war and only he and two cousins were left.

Pierre Anctil, a historian at the University of Ottawa, visited Auschwitz last year and was "deeply moved" at the site where mass murder and genocide were successfully experimented for the first time.

"Never before in the history of mankind had this been attempted on such a scale," he said. "In a sense, all other genocides since and all other forms of mass elimination refer to Auschwitz in one way or another by their methods, intent and results."

Four years after the horrors of Auschwitz, Eisen left for Canada where his life was transformed.

"My life unfolded here, and I was the happiest guy in the world," he said. "Canada gave me a life and a family and all the good things in life you can imagine and I will be forever grateful for this."

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/20...f-4795764.html