Healing from Within

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Surviving the Holocaust With Will to Survive: Soul Intact

• July 29, 2019
• Jack J. Hersch
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Welcome to Healing From Within with host Sheryl Glick author of Life Is No Coincidence: The Life and Afterlife Connection and The Living Spirit Answers for Healing and Infinite Love which shares stories of spiritual awakening and communication and ways to improve through intuition our personal and collective life story guiding us to health happiness and purposeful action even in the midst of terrible challenges. Sheryl is delighted to welcome Jack Hersch author of Death March Escape a tale of survival of body and spirit in a time of the Holocaust not that long ago, during the second World War when insanity and terror ruled the world and death was everywhere. Jack tells the story of his father David Hersch remarkable man who twice escaped death by the Nazis at the end of World War 11 due to an incredible confluence of luck fate faith and will to survive that made him unique.

As listeners of “Healing From Within” are well aware my guests and I seek to understand our dual nature as spiritual beings experiencing a physical life and learning through history metaphysics science religion and spirituality ways to understand human nature and how we may survive many challenges or hardships through the energy and courage of the soul.

In today’s episode of “Healing From Within” Jack Hersch shares a truly remarkable journey of his father who not once but twice survived death as a teenager being taken from his hometown of Dej Hungary to Mauthhausen Concentration camp, the harshest cruelest camp in the German Reich. After his father’s death a photograph of his father surfaced on the Mauthhausen website and sent Jack on a journey back in time to learn of secrets his father had never shared with him.

Jack tells us of some of the characters and places in the story and connections that helped them perhaps survive the trauma of those awful crazy soulless times of hatred but still there was hope and love.

David the survivor of two escape attempts on a death march towards the end of WW11 described his youth as happy and unremarkable He played soccer in the local park, worked in his father’s soap factory, rode his bicycle went to school where he spent half his day on secular subjects—Romanian Hungarian history math and science and fluently spoke five languages: Hungarian Romanian Yiddish Hebrew and German. In the late 1930”s his families comfortable existence grew unstable.

“Official government-sponsored anti-Semitism was encoded in Hungarian life. Two years earlier Hungary had established a series of anti-Jewish laws which defined, among other things, who was a Jew, how many Jews could be employed by a single company and how many Jews could participate in certain professions It wasn’t a duplication of the German Nuremberg Laws restricting Jewish Life in the Third Reich, but it was a strong echo of worse to come..Hungary’s Jews were not yet being sent to concentration camps unlike the Jews of every other country under Nazi influence or control. Though Hungary’s Jews like David weren’t sent in the early years of the war to the camps they were part of the first Labor Service battalions performing city work.” His father never went into the very difficult experiences of those days in the camp and always maintained a positive upbeat sense of humor as Jack was growing up, unlike many other Holocaust survivors who were quiet and always sad.

Jack his son tells of his father’s remarrying after his mother died and the fact that his father developed a problem with his mitral valve as had his mother. Odd it seems I was living with my family in California and my Dad asked us to come to a Passover Seder in New York. It was April 7th Dad was going in for surgery and he wanted to tell the story of the camps again. Maybe he sensed he would be passing and needed to share more of the truth of what really happened in the events in the camp. He told Jack that In 1943 a regiment of German soldiers arrived in Dej. My father noticed the soldiers were somewhat older had been on the Russian front and had a deep weariness to them. Some of the soldiers lived in our house and didn’t seem to mind living with Jews..not every German was an anti-Semite. We had not even heard of Auschwitz the cattle car transports gas chambers labor camps and The Final Solution. Even Hungarian Jews who were warned of what soon would be happening to them refused to believe the worst. Jews in other countries had not been able to get the word of what was happening in those death camps out to the world.

After my father’s death I was made aware by a cousin in Israel that a picture had surfaced on the website of the KZ Mauthausen Concentration Camp of my father as a young man who had barely survived the war and Jack embarked on a personal journey of discovery but then Jack was already an adventuresome man who flew planes skied and live life in pursuit of personal accomplishments.

Jack soon discovered that on April 19 1944 his saba or great grandfather died of a heart attack knowing that they would all soon be taken to a camp He had been gassed in WW 1 and his health had been delicate since his return from a Russian prison camp. When Jack’s father talked about the Ghetto they were put in, I imagined it was like the Warsaw Ghetto where in 1940 400,000 Jews from Warsaw Poland were moved into a 1.3 square mile walled off section of the great city. I was always amazed that in 1942 there was a great uprising by the more militant inhabitants and it lasted a month before they were all killed.

But the ghetto my father and family were put in was a section of the Bungur Forest –no buildings no homes no kitchens no bathrooms just a field in the forest surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie: Hungary’s national police force. It was inconceivable that 20th century Europeans would be asked to leave their homes and reestablish life in the forest. But what came next was even more imaginable.

During Jack’s journey he found the Friedmann House where his father had been hidden after his second escape from the death march. It was a sturdy block like two story house that looked formidable and sage with light brown stucco and a red tiled roof. My father had always said they put him in the attic of the barn next to their house on a bed of hay and straw. I could see on the picture that the roof had no windows so the attic would have been dark The barn was certainly the safest place to put him in even though it must have been dark and lonely with no one to see.

Jack meets with Angelika Schlackl a guide and historian at Mauthausen Memorial his prime contact in Austria. Enns my father’s town of 11,000 people was seven miles from the Danube. Like most medieval towns Enns’ dominant feature is its central square and the 190 foot tall belfry, a combination clock watch and bell tower built in the 1500’s.

My father told me that he remembered on the fifth day in the forest ghetto, the German army came and said they needed a baker and my father told them he knew a little about baking. So he was taken to live in town and he avoided the worst of ghetto living in that forest. On May 28, 1944 the semblance of order and peacefulness the people had established evaporated. All the Jews were ordered into trains for transport to Birkenau. It took a total of three transports to empty Dej’s forest ghetto of nearly 8, 000 Jews. Jack learned that most of Mauthausen’s prisoners were non-Jewish communists socialists intellectuals politicians resistance fighters gays gypsies common criminals prisoners of war and others deemed unfit by the Nazi flag. They came from German Austria and Czechoslavakia.

And now all these years later most of the people working for the memorial: historians curators archivists interns etc were not Jewish. So strictly for the horribleness and not to memorialize the attempted genocide of the Jews, these Mauthausen Memorial employees had accepted the mission of preventing the tragedy of the camps from disappearing from history.

Even though Jews were not the main portion of the camps population mostly Jews were on the death camp marches. The primary purpose of these transports at the end of the war was to move Jews away from the Allied armies rapidly closing in on central Germany. Their death toll was appalling After surviving sometimes for years in concentration camps and labor battalions and barely weeks away from the war’s end, half of the 20,000 Jew who left KZ Mauthausen in a series of death marches on April 1945 didn’t make it. At least 6,000 died on the road before reaching their destination 30 miles away. Some died of a bullet to the back of the neck when they dropped from exhaustion. And others were outright murdered by Nazi guards. Over 4, 000 more died at their destination where there was little food no water and inadequate shelter. The death marches wee aptly named.

As we are living now in modern times, the age of social media and Smart phones computers and advanced technology there seems to be once again a return or resurgence of anti –Semitism, or perhaps it never really changes. We might try to do more to help people curb hatred religious or racial prejudice and begin to heal the world again.

Maybe learning that the Nazis didn’t coin the term concentration camp but that it originated in the late 1800’s referring to refugee camps in which people were concentrated during Spain’s Ten Year War with Cuba. Though these concentration camps were overcrowded and unhealthy places, the Nazis use of the same term for their infamous slave labor and death camps gave it its sinister connotation.

Think of the slaves being packed into old fashioned ships brought from Africa to many places of the world. Think of the Jewish people as slaves in the Egyptian times. Think of the refugee camps for the Syrian people and 500,000 citizens dying in a religious civil war and millions migrating to other lands and think of African countries like Somalia which are unhealthy places that stifle the mind heart and body of their occupants, and even if they survive, they carry the scars of these conditions physically emotionally all the days of their life. Trust and love is often turned to hatred and fear of others. Sometimes they do to others without realizing it, that it was done to them.

Although its stated mission was to provide slave labor for its granite quarries and later for manufacturing plants, KZ Mauthausen’s true purpose was to slowly murder its prisoners. They were worked to death, starved to death, beaten to death, shot, drowned, exposed to freezing cold and to sweltering heat. And always their possessions and wealth were taken from them.

Jack found out more about the people at the Mauthausen website who had gotten his father’s photo. He noticed the English caption underneath which read, “In April 1945 Ignaz and Barbara Friedmann from Enns, Kristein rescued the completely exhausted David Hersch from the death march from Mauthausen and Gunskirchen and hid him until the end of the war. Jack knew about the Friedmanns how they had found my father the day after his second escape and had hidden him at great risk to themselves until American soldiers liberated Ennis their town.

Many survivors had gone their entire lives without breathing a word of what they had endured. Some had not cracked a smile or told a joke since the day they were crammed aboard a cattle car bound for places like Auschwitz and Treblinka. However Jack’s father David was nothing like those survivors. He particularly loved to tell his survival story on Passover. After all, the holiday commemorates the Jewish breakout in the dead of night from Egyptian bondage under the command of Moses and presumably with supernatural help. As readily as my father told his tale, I sensed a hidden darkness within him, a pain he never shared with me. The only hints he ever gave of it was when he’d tell me he hadn’t slept well or had a nightmare about the camps.

Vivi my cousin asked me if I had the picture that was on that website and I said, “NO.” Her mother remembered the picture taken by a local photographer used as an advertisement for his studio. Then Vivi went on to say that perhaps Jack’s father got it when he went back to that place in 1977. He went there alone on his way to Israel. Vivis mother and the two other surviving Hersch brothers all lived near each other in Natanya. My father lived in Long Beach New York and visited his sisters and brothers at least twice a year. Jack was curious to know why his father had never told him of the return trip back to the camps.

Finally on the last Passover with his father he described his trip to the camp Birkenau and the process that had unfolded there. My father’s Haftlings –Personal Karte his Prisoners Personal Card which survived the war is date stamped showing he was admitted to KZ Auschwitz Wednesday June 7, 1944 pm. The train actually took him to KZ Birkenau two miles away. Also know as Auschwitz 11 it was opened to alleviate crowding in Auschwitz. More than ninety percent of those that arrived there were killed within hours of arrival. By the time my father got there it had turned into the penultimate Nazi killing factory.

The initial introduction to Birkenau was remarkably benign. Men and women were separated. Children went with their mothers. Walking along with the men were “kapos” Jewish guards to help with the Jewish prisoners, who quickly said to David, Why didn’t you try to run Don’t you know what this is? Astonishingly my father still assumed they were entering a resettlement camp of some sort. The process involved my father mother and his family standing in line waiting for the dreaded selection, in German, the word is selection where incoming Jews were sorted like wigets in a factory, from good from bad, functional from defective, most to be killed immediately in gas chambers, the rest to be worked to death in concentration camps. My father and his brother in law were sent to the right. He noticed the elderly and nearly all women and children were sent to the left. As my father went to the right, he saw his mother and felt a pain in his heart. Men like him strong went to the right, and women kids overweight men, much older men, to the other side. The meek were not inheriting the earth: they were being slaughtered.

After the journey back to that place of so much suffering for his father Jack began to feel and understand his father and himself in a more complete way.

Jack wrote, “I study the field called Revier at Mauthausen built by Russian prisoners after Hilter and Stalin were no longer working together, which they then called Sanitatslager or the Sanitary Camp, which was used for very sick prisoners. I study the field more closely. My father had been somewhere on that turf for three months. Though it is now barren, I easily picture row after row of German field grey barracks filling the field when Dad was a KZler there. This is why I have come. This is what I want to see. Places where my father existed, places where he persevered, places where he beat the odds. Seeing the Wiener-Graben mine and walking into the quarry, I think about how thousands of lives were stolen there to produce the granite fascades and roadbed of Hitler’s Germany. I tell Angelika my guide that I cannot imagine facing this sinister mass every morning for years as some of Mauthausen KZlers did.

I have the unmistakable impression that I am experiencing the same feeling he felt during his first days in the camps, when he lost track of time. Psychologists would say we were dissociating. We were detaching ourselves from our environments, severing ourselves from our realities to cope with the extremes we were seeing and feeling. Obviously, my father’s dissociating was very different than mine. He was on a real world journey through hell.”

Sheryl says to Jack I believe yours was a journey through the memories perhaps of the Jewish people who worked in the quarries of Egypt 4, 000 years ago, and what has been shared with us since childhood about the struggles of the Jewish people then and in WW 11. For the most part the Jewish people are a productive and loving people who honor their families and the nations they live and work in. So it is hard for us to understand why when things go bad economics political situation famines wars in any part of the world, the Jewish people are targeted first Right now in our own Congress there are those who are pushing an anti-Semitic and Anti – Israel agenda as they work for their Muslim brotherhood and interests. It seems to never end: one group. race religion gender culture against another. We must hope and work towards a universal understanding of the soul or energetic oneness of life and conquer the differences that separate our need for compassion and love.

Perhaps what Jack saw written on the memorial the eastern wall of KZ Mauthausen which contains 10 plaques identical except for the language universally expressed in The English plague written in all capital letter and without punctuation might be remembered:

Jack wrote, “The words on the plague seem inadequate to Jack. Not nearly enough to memorialize the 37,000 or more dead whose blood and sweat lay under my feet. The best way to memorialize concentration camps, to remember and honor those who were murdered in them, is to leave them untouched, like Mauthausen Auschwitz and Birkenau flags to the world reminding everyone of what can happen when prejudices and power are left unchecked. Like the ground where the Twin Towers once stood is rightfully considered hallowed never to be built upon so no one ever forgets what happened. I’ve been there It’s powerful. It hits home.

Jack J. Hersch author of Death March Escape has shared the authentic story of his father’s spiritually guided survival of the Holocaust and the descriptions of the death camps Auschwitz and Birkenau as well as Mauthausen where he finally made the death march at the end of the war, when the Germans knew the Allies would soon be there. Miraculously, he escaped and was taken in by a family who hid him.

In summarizing today’s episode of “Healing From Within” with a discussion with Jack the son of a Holocaust survivor who carried the partial hurt and pain all his life, knowing that many in his father’s family and friends had not survived a war. All wars seek to claim take or annex territory and people’s prized possessions and impose their way of life, but a war by a world out of control, who sought to eliminate those who they simply deemed unworthy to live due to their religious and cultural standards is unconscionable and inhuman. To think that people can be so devoid of emotion and moral codes and can even entertain such murderous ideas and actions is painful to consider but human nature and the need to survive, often trumps the grander need of the soul to evolve into greater compassion and love, It has been throughout human history, a challenge for good leaders to have their people follow the heart instincts, and not the ego based “dog eat dog” mentality of physical reality, which often tricks us into believing we are in mortal danger and must fight for prosperity health and success.

Right now in this moment in a technologically advanced world there are Anti-Semitic and Anti-Christian attacks here in America and in the world. Forces are at work trying to reenact the hateful rhetoric and destructive behaviors of the Holocaust. Righteous and decent people will hopefully stem the tide of depravity hatred and ignorance and triumph over evil.

Jack wrote, “In the camp it wasn’t just on Yom Kippur the day of Atonement the holiest day in the Jewish Calendar but I prayed to God every day in the camps, Every day….My father’s eyes welled up for a second time that evening. Maybe he was thinking of his parents right then. I knew he never doubted that his survival was not happenstance, was not just luck, was not just the force of his upbeat personality and monumental will power. In his view, he’d had help. His mother’s last words to him that he would take a “luxury train ride one day” a premonition was proof. My father had held on to the possibility of that train trip and he held on to God making it a reality. And when he survived he committed himself to saying those same few prayers he had said each day in the camps, to saying thank you, every day for the rest of his life.”

Jack and I would have you remember the same way his father’s faith saw him through the most life threatening events each day for years we believe God watches over us our family as well. We may not yet have scientific proof but in our heart and soul we know life is not random and each experience whether we see it as good or bad ultimately leads our soul to refine and get closer to the divine force of life and holding onto that faith is the key to eternal life.