From SF Chronicle
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...NG8MB16Q91.DTL
Auschwitz memories haunt survivors -- and a liberator
Freedom arrived 60 years ago today, but time is no salve
Julian Guthrie, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, January 27, 2005
The most infamous death camp in the history of humanity was liberated 60 years ago today.
It was Jan. 27, 1945. A day of emotion but devoid of joy.
Linda Breder spent three years in Auschwitz. From her home in San Francisco, Breder, 80, said with tears in her eyes, "No matter what I do in my life, no matter how many years go by, I am never far from Auschwitz." Her left arm bears the bluish identification tattoo she was given at the Nazi concentration camp. She was number 1173.
She was not there the day the camp was liberated. Instead, she was enduring yet another fight for her life: the forced march of thousands of Auschwitz prisoners rounded up by the retreating Germans the week before.
Naum Reznik, now 88 and living in Los Angeles, commanded one of the Soviet army units that liberated Auschwitz. Reznik spoke last week of the day he entered Auschwitz. He was a hardened veteran of four years of battle. But when he walked into Auschwitz, he thought he was entering the gates of hell.
Acrid ashes of human flesh floated in the air like waxy snowflakes. Skeletal prisoners greeted him with hollow stares. Signs of degradation were everywhere: in the piles of human bones, of hair, of eyeglasses, of clothing.
Liberator and liberated have never met. Reznik and Breder are connected by the place called Auschwitz, where more than 1.2 million Jews, Poles, Gypsies and other victims lost their lives. Today, political leaders from around the globe will gather at the site in Poland to remember what Italian writer and camp survivor Primo Levi called the "demolition of a man."
The story of liberation touches on both the deepest sufferings of man and the resiliency of the human spirit.
"The guards told us that we will only leave Auschwitz through the chimney, " said Breder, speaking slowly and deliberately in a Slavic accent. "I was determined to live because I wanted the world to know this story. While we were in the camp, the world was silent."
Breder feels the heaviness of unanswered questions. Where was God during the Holocaust? Why was the world quiet as Jews were exterminated by Germans? Why are humans capable of genocide?
In all, an estimated 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. In addition, about 70,000 Poles, 21,000 Gypsies and tens of thousands of political and religious dissidents, homosexuals and disabled people lost their lives to the Nazis. By the end of World War II, close to two out of every three European Jews had been killed as part of Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution." The word Holocaust, Greek in origin, means "sacrifice by fire."
Auschwitz was the largest of the extermination camps. It has come to represent gruesome suffering, gratuitous cruelty and the systematic reduction of human beings to numbers. A sign on the gate of the camp -- today a museum -- is profane, ironic. It reads "Arbeit Macht Frei" -- work makes you free.
In the final months of the war, German concentration camps across Europe were liberated by Allied forces from the west and the Red Army from the east. Liberation brought an end to the daily degradation but not to the sights, sounds and smells of the war.
Auschwitz comes to Breder in unexpected moments. Riding Muni, her left arm clutching a handrail, she sees a man studying, without understanding, her tattoo. Hearing a certain musical score, she flashes to the sadistic marches in the snow, paced to the sound of German songs. Smelling barbecue, she cries.
Reznik carries a different set of memories. He did not live through Auschwitz but instead glimpsed the horrors like a witness to the detritus of a deadly pileup.
He has two small photos of Auschwitz, taken at liberation. One is of a crematory blown up by German soldiers as they fled the camp. The other is of the railway where Jews and other prisoners were unloaded like cattle to the slaughter. A line at the left would be for those who would die in the gas chamber. A line to the right was for those who would work.
On the back of one photo, Reznik wrote a note to his parents: "In this picture are the remains of a huge oven where the Germans burned the people in this camp of death. Here you can see huge piles of bones of those people. Among the bones were many burned Jewish prayer books." The back of the photo, in faded words written in Cyrillic Russian, is dated January 1945.
"The Germans tried to wipe out all of the signs that they had collected these people and killed them," Reznik said of actions taken in the weeks leading up to liberation.
"We believed the Germans were an educated nation," Reznik said. "We couldn't believe they were capable of bringing about this suffering."
Reznik was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and grew up in Tbilisi, Soviet Georgia. After graduating from college, he entered the army at age 24. Reznik served for four years in World War II and engaged in some of the fiercest battles, including in Kursk and Stalingrad. Two of his three brothers were killed fighting the Germans. By war's end, Reznik had not only survived but had risen to the rank of commander of an artillery brigade.
In his small apartment in a Russian neighborhood in Los Angeles, Reznik bears the wounds and the medals of the war. Still tall and formidable, he sat on a sofa in the living room recently, keeping a watchful gaze. His speaks little English, so his wife of 57 years, Sophia Reznik -- a former English teacher in Russia -- served as translator.
The two live in a Russian neighborhood near West Hollywood in an apartment complex inhabited mostly by Russians. They watch Russian television and read Russian newspapers.
Reznik said that when his unit arrived in Krakow, a city near Auschwitz, he began to hear from Poles of the suffering of Jews at the camp.
"When I heard about it, I wanted to go there," said Reznik, who is Jewish. "When we entered, we were just shocked. We saw people on the verge of dying. Some tried to raise a hand but didn't have any strength."
Prisoners told Reznik stories about the camp. They spoke in Polish and Hungarian and repeatedly asked: "What will happen to us? Where will we go? Where will we find refuge?"
Reznik said that an old man, dressed only in thin, striped pajamas, had taken him on a tour of the camp. The man said he would not leave the camp. He wanted to die where his wife and daughter had perished.
"This old man was our guide," Reznik said. "We saw barns that were the crematoriums. The Polish man wouldn't walk in there, but we did. There were slats on the floor where gas came out. We went to other barns and saw awful things, hair of all colors, blond, brown, red, black, piled to the ceiling. The hair was made into these perfect braids. We saw all kinds of shoes. The small shoes belonging to children. We saw piles of eyeglasses."
An estimated 7,000 inmates inhabited Auschwitz at the time of liberation. Tens of thousands of others had been forced out of the camp on death marches through the snow toward Berlin.
Reznik said his unit had come across hundreds of dead bodies along the roads leading in and out of camp. They were prisoners who apparently succumbed to the march, he said. The ones who remained in Auschwitz were too sick to leave or had chosen to stay.
Reznik was overcome with a deep sense of shame.
"We had a depressing feeling, a feeling of guilt due to our unforgivable slowness for liberating them," Reznik said. "Had we been there faster, we could have saved many lives."
After the war, Reznik moved to Moscow and resumed his studies. He became a professor of mechanical and agricultural engineering and taught at a scientific institute of agricultural machinery in Moscow. He has written four textbooks. The Rezniks moved to the United States in 1986 to provide a better life for their children.
They have three sons: a cardiologist, a computer engineer and a stem-cell researcher. Naum Reznik is head of a local association of Russian engineers and scientists, which meets every Friday near his home. He and his wife founded a Russian language library that bears his name and contains about 25, 000 titles. The library includes articles Reznik has written about the war and liberation.
In one article, Reznik wrote, "Our nation must mark the triumphs of the war as well as the bitter traumas of the Holocaust. To not know about this or to forget what happened is a crime, a sin for all humanity."
Walking through the small Russian library, Reznik said he considered it his duty to keep the "crimes of Germans" alive.
There is no forgetting for Linda Breder, who was the 173rd Jewish woman to enter Auschwitz. In 1939, all Jews living in Slovakia were forced from their homes and into a camp on the outskirts of town. On March 24, 1942, Breder was taken from her family. She was told she would go to Germany to work and earn money to send back home. Instead, she was sent to Auschwitz.
She never saw her father, stepmother, stepsister, three brothers and aunts and uncles again. Her sister survived in Hungary by carrying the fake papers of a Catholic.
Linda Breder doesn't know how she survived. She first worked in the fields around Auschwitz, spreading manure for fertilizer with her hands. She then worked in the cavernous room next to the crematorium, sorting through the belongings of those who were gassed.
She learned things no one should learn: that Greek prisoners hid jewelry and money in halva, a traditional sweet confection; that Jews sewed coins in clothing; that Eastern Europeans pushed valuables into lard.
She said there were 40 barracks full of the clothing of Jews and other inmates who had been put to death. Belongings were sent to the families of German soldiers. In a small act of rebellion, and one that surely would have gotten her killed had she been caught, Breder sewed the words, "Attention, you are wearing the clothes of a Jew" deep inside the fabric.
From her home in San Francisco's Sunset District, Breder talked of her experiences with harrowing detail and visible pain. Her husband of 58 years, Fridrich Breder, 86, also survived Auschwitz. As Fridrich Breder spoke, Linda Breder reached over and gently rolled back his left sleeve. It was a simple gesture of a wife caring for a husband. But with it came tears. On his forearm was the number given to him by the Nazis: 33034.
At Auschwitz, he was put to work as a bricklayer, building barracks and crematoriums. He grew so thin and weak that he planned suicide. He would throw himself against the high-voltage barbed-wire fence rather than be killed by the Germans. His body would join others on the fence, as it was a not an uncommon practice.
"I was a Musulmann," said Fridrich Breder, referring to the term used in the camps to describe men and women who were reduced to bones, many weighing less than 50 pounds. "I was so hungry I could only think of food." His suicide was averted when he was moved to another unit to work inside. He began to regain his strength.
Despite the horrors, Fridrich Breder has an easy, relaxed smile. He looks at his wife with a deep love.
The two met after the war, standing in a bread line in their native Slovakia. Linda Breder -- then Libusha Reich -- turned around and saw "a good-looking man." She laughed as she said this. She asked him where he was during the war, and he responded Auschwitz. She asked if he had any family left. He said no. Everyone had gone to the gas chambers.
The two began dating. He had a job as a baker and gave her warm, freshly baked bread. She said she didn't know if she was falling in love with the bread or the handsome Slovakian. They married six months later and now have two children, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Like Sophia and Naum Reznik, Linda and Fridrich Breder immigrated to the United States for their children. They came straight to San Francisco. Fridrich Breder found work at a Russian bakery. She got a job as a cleaning lady at a retirement home. Through saving and skimping, she eventually became the owner of the retirement center in San Francisco.
"I cherish that we had a chance to come to America and start a new life," she said, looking around her lovely home. Her husband spent 15 years working on the terraced backyard. It is his pride and joy.
But the bright sunlight filling the morning room was muted by memories that refuse to fade. As she thinks of liberation from camp, she remembers too much: the child who screamed for water and was executed by the German soldier; the freezing marches done in precise rows of five; the soldier who held target practice by having Jews stand with cans on their heads.
She holds her head in her hands and cries as she remembers the crematory. "It was burning day and night. The flames were so high. Fat-ashes fell on the camp. We were always smeared ... our faces ..." She cannot finish her sentence.
She instead asks a question that has haunted others. She went into the camp as an Orthodox Jew. For the first three months, she prayed for help, for survival, for a miracle. She eventually stopped praying. She hasn't prayed since.
She attends temple for the community and to meditate. She goes to whisper the names of loved ones who died at Auschwitz.
"The only grave they have is in my memory," she said. "I feel I lived to tell the story."
E-mail Julian Guthrie at
jguthrie@sfchronicle.com.
Linda Breder says a German photographer ordered prisoners to smile while their photos were taken. Breder is in the foreground. Photo courtesy of Linda Breder
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