|
Holocaust Survivor Shares First Hand Description of Hell
by Ryan Wright
"As the time of the war dragged on, and things became worse and worse in the camps, and the food became scarcer and the water disappeared, we became filthier and our brains worked less and less… We became zombies. And so towards the end as we saw things happen, we just stood there. We were diminished to become objects... We were so dehumanized that death didn't really hold any fear for us. It had no meaning. It was just a word, and we didn't use that word very often..." "
Walter Ziffer
Speaking in Broyhill Chapel
(Left) With a friend shortly after the Nazi invasion in 1939. Note arm bands identifying them as Jews. (Photo from UNC-A archives)
|
Adjunct Professor Walter Ziffer is one of the lucky Jewish people who were able to survive the persecution and mass genocide that Hitler and non-Jewish Germans committed against the Jewish people in Europe during World War II.
He told about his experiences during the Holocaust on April 20 in Broyhill Chapel. Ziffer teaches "Prodigal Sisters: Early Christianity" at Mars Hill College. He was an ordained Christian minister before his return to the Jewish faith.
Jews in Europe had been persecuted for centuries before Hitler came to power. The persecution during Hitler's time was just on a larger scale than at any other time in history. Even Ziffer experienced persecution early in life.
When he was just a young child of eight or nine, he was walking with one of his friends who was also a Jew when they were confronted by a group of Czech children who proceeded to insult and throw rocks at them. Ziffer was able to get away, but if it weren't for the assistance of their town "idiot," his friend would have been caught and severely beaten. So, years before the Holocaust even started, Ziffer was already feeling the sting of persecution and hatred.
"What I am trying to show you is that even then, anti-Semitism was alive and well. And you should know… that anti-Semitism was to a great extent unfortunately caused by the wrong teaching of the Churches, coming right out of the New Testament, and was misrepresented, and then fed to the people, and that stayed with us unfortunately for 19 centuries until things blew up," he said.
The breaking point came when the Nazis forced all Jews to wear yellow stars with the word "Jew" in German printed on them. "We were marked people. Now this is extremely important, because from that point on we were beyond the law. We were outlaws, and anything that anyone could do, could be done to us."
Ziffer's town in the present-day Czech Republic was one of the first places invaded by the German army at the beginning of World War II. His family and other Jews were inducted into forced labor. One of the jobs that he was forced to do during this time was rake the leaves in the parks. These leaves were then set ablaze by the German soldiers, and the Jews were forced to jump over the burning piles while the soldiers watched for entertainment.
German soldiers constantly raided their house and stole their cameras, jewelry, and other expensive items. They were eventually forced from their house and placed into a large dance hall with other Jewish families.
It was during this time that Ziffer found the first love of his life. "Real love, not puppy love," said Ziffer. He fell for a girl named Lydia, whom he worked with. They did everything together up until the day she told him that she was running away to Russia with her family. A few days after Lydia left, a traveler showed up and told Ziffer's father that Lydia's family was shot and killed by soldiers during their trip to Russia; this was a devastating blow to Ziffer.
On June 20, 1941, his family was informed that they were being relocated to the East and he would be separated from them. He knew a few of the boys that he traveled with, so the now 14-year-old wasn't totally alone. They were crammed into open cattle cars, which left no protection from the weather and no room to move. When they finally reached their destination the guards violently pushed them from the cars, which caused most to fall on top of one another. They then marched for miles on end to the campsite, and along the way; everyone discarded the bags they had with them because it became too difficult to carry them. When they reached the camp they were forced to have their entire body completely shaved and received substandard clothing. During his entire four-year term as a prisoner, he received only five changes of clothing. All of this helped to destroy the prisoners' individuality and allowed for better control over them.
The life that they were forced to lead in these camps, as Ziffer put it, was nothing short of "Hell." Their beds were nothing more than a burlap sack filled with sand on a piece of wood, and they were beaten if their blankets had the slightest bit of dust on them during inspections. Nearly everyone was beaten. There was also an infestation of lice, so every day they would have to check one another to make sure that no one got any lice under their skin because people who got sick from infections were killed immediately. They had to endure the constant barrage of insults and violence directed at them. They were only allowed 14 oz of bread and hot black coffee-water per day, and the actual quantity you received depended on how much the person distributing the rations liked you.
Every day around 10-15 people were whipped or killed in various other ways, and their bodies were either cremated or dumped into ditches. The commanders of these camps found pleasure in thinking up incredibly harsh and disturbing punishment. One involved putting a group of men into a room and dumping boiling water on top of them. Immediately after they would dump cold water on them. They would continue to do this while at the same time whipping the men until they died. Ziffer learned of this when he was ordered to discard these bodies in a ditch outside of the camp.
On May 8, 1945, Ziffer and the other Jews in his camp were lined up again, and he noticed that there were no longer any soldiers in the watch towers. It didn't dawn on him exactly what was going on
. "When you can't eat anything for four years, when you're so malnourished, your brain no longer functions. You cannot absorb. You cannot process the information," said Ziffer.
The camp commander came and walked up to the internal commander, a Jewish man, and whispered something to him, then turned to leave and threw his keys into the camp. "We had no idea what that meant because we couldn't process the information," said Ziffer, "and so we still stood there and waited and waited." After a while a Russian tank rolled through and knocked down the camp's triple fence and continued on. "We were free, the fence was down but we did not understand and couldn't make out what had happened to us, so we stood here for another half hour. Finally the man standing next to me said,' I think something important has happened,' so I said to him lets get some food, he agreed and soon the ranks began to file out," explained Ziffer.
The newly freed prisoners went out into the cities and raided the abandoned homes for any food or clothing that could be salvaged, but since they didn't really know what to do at this point they returned to the camp. Ziffer explains that, "Freedom is something that demands decisions, that demands obligations, that demands some kind of idea of what you want to do with that freedom, and these ideas don't fall ready made from the tree. So we didn't know what to do." This is the reason they returned to the camp, but it was a different camp -- one filled with campfires and food cooking.
After a while women started to come to the camp, and he built up the courage to ask one of them if they had ever ran into some women named Ziffer; one of the women responded that there were some women by the name of Ziffer in their camp. So he jacked a passing German for his bike and rode for two days until he reached the camp. He noticed his mother, sister, and cousin, who looked just as bad as he did before they recognized him. They walked right by him at first to unload some food, so he walked up to them and introduced himself and they were reunited. The camp that his father was at was freed earlier than the rest, so to the family's surprise he was waiting at their old house when they finally returned.
At the beginning of his talk, Walter Ziffer recited these verses from Proverbs 24:10-12:
If you faint in the day of adversity,
Your strength is small.
If you hold back from rescuing those being taken away to death,
Those who are staggering to the slaughter,
If you say, "Look, we did not know this."
does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it?
And will he not repay all according to their deeds?
"He, of course, is God," Ziffer said.
Click for a complete transcript of Ziffer's speech
Give us your feedback. We value your opinions.
The Hilltop reserves the right not to post anonymous comments or any that could be judged slanderous, that make unverifiable allegations of fact, or use language we consider in bad taste.
All fields must be filled in.
HOME
| 
