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   Citizen-Times

Walter Ziffer
Adjunct Professor And Holocaust Survivor

Broyhill Chapel at Mars Hill College
April 20, 2006

I want to begin by reading this selection from Proverbs, which I think is very pertinent to the situation:

The He, of course, is God.

Well, we know, unfortunately, that many, way too many people, said "We do not know about this." And some of these people exist to this day. They'll say, "I never heard about the Holocaust. I have no idea what happened." Well, hard to believe. Very hard to believe. What one might, or should say is, and rightfully so, many many people in Germany and in the occupied German countries, and also in America, in free countries during that period of time, forgot completely about the Old Testament saying, as well as Jesus saying, "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Many Holocaust survivors who speak, and there are still a good many of us who speak - I think in ten years there will be nobody left, because we are a dying group. Soon there will be nobody left. Many Holocaust speakers who begin this kind of a talk, witnessing what they lived, what they experienced, will begin by saying, "Oh, our world in those days prior to World War II was so wonderful, so beautiful, everything was peaceful, everything was happy, until Hitler came to power, or before World War II began."

Now, this may be true to some Jews who lived perhaps in Scandinavia, in certain Western countries. Certainly in Central Europe and in Eastern Europe, and in Western Russia - I happen to be from Czechoslovakia -very close to southern Poland - in those countries this could not have been true. It just couldn't. Because anti-Semitism, which is this terrible, terrible prejudice - discrimination, intolerance, hatred of Jews and of everything that is related to Jewishness and to Judaism, this sickness, I would call it, of heart and mind - has been around now for 19 centuries, believe it or not.

I don't know how much you have studied history - I have no idea, can't possibly know it - but if you have studied history correctly, you should know about this. On and off, here and there, there was anti-Semitism. In the wake of this anti-Semitism, hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered during 19 centuries. And of course all this came to a peak between 1933 and 1945, when just short of six million of my co-religionists were murdered. Totally innocent people. Believe it or not, among the six and a half million people who were murdered there were one and a half million children. Now you know that children could not have perpetrated any great crimes. They were all totally innocent as children.

Now I am one who survived. And at this point, because it is rather important to me that I survived and am standing before you, I would like to introduce you to a neighbor of mine, very briefly, who lives across my driveway, Julian Bailey, and he lives in Weaverville, and he was out during that crucial time - out on bombing missions with the U.S. Airforce. My father happened to be in a camp by the name of Blechhammer - he was deported - and I'll talk about that later - in that camp the Nazis were trying to produce synthetic gasoline. And my friend Julian Bailey flew over Blechhammer where my father was and bombed that plant. And that plant, thanks to him and his associates in the Air Force, never produced any gasoline, and it is thanks to him and to people like him, who did that kind of work, putting their lives on the line, that I'm here. That I survived. Unfortunately, the other six million or so, didn't quite make it. So I'd like Julian to stand for a moment…. (applause) So it is people like that who will help us, because not only did they help us survive, but we, all of us here, live in a free country thanks to people like Julian.

So let me tell you what happened to me and to my family, to my friends, during this horrible horrible time. I cannot condense just short of four years, during which I was a prisoner, into 45 minutes that I have here to tell you the story. All I can do is use vignettes, little excerpts from here and there that I am pulling from my brain that I would like to share with you.

These were four years spent in Hell. H-E-L-L. This is the real word for what it really was. But things, you see, didn't happen just then, when the Nazis came in. Because anti-Semitism, as I said, has lasted for 19 centuries. I'll give you an example.

When I was still free, in Czechoslavakia, when I was a little boy of nine years, I think, eight, nine -- I had an Orthodox Jewish friend. And you know in Central Europe, in that area where we lived, Orthodox Jews wore sidelocks --- payot, they were called - and they were very recognizable. I never wore those because we were very assimilated Jews. One day we left home, this Jacob Katz and I, Katz was his name, he was the son of a tailor in our town. Now this was before Hitler came in, I want you to know. And as we went home from school, we had to go through an underpass, under the railroad. And as we passed through, suddenly rocks were just raining on us, stones thrown at us. And we heard the refrain, Zhid zhiddic Zhid. Zhid in all Slav languages means Jew. And zhiddic means "you little stinking" Jew. It's a very pejorative term. And so we started running. I ran in one direction. Jacob ran in the other direction. I ran to an apartment house and looked out through the glass door. And I saw that these boys were very close to catching up to my friend, and had they caught up with him, they probably would have beaten him up. And at that point, there came galloping around our town "Idiot". Many towns in Europe had a town "idiot". He was called that - L…. which means in German, "The Stupid One." He announced the coming of the circus. He picked up the droppings from the horses. And he had a two-wheeled cart that he pulled. He arrived, galloping by. He had long blond hair also. And he picked up my friend, put him on the cart, and galloped away with him.

Afterwards I found out he deposited him in front of his parents' house - it was a little house where the tailor shop was --- He saved that boy. But, you see, we have to be thankful to people who are handicapped as well. He really saved that boy from a bad beating. But what I'm trying to show you is, that even then, and we're talking about 1936, 1935, anti-Semitism was alive and well. And this is how it presented itself at times. There were, of course, other incidents as well that I don't want to get into.

This is why I think that beginning with Hitler is the wrong thing. You should know, every one of you, and this is a Christian-related college - that makes it so much more important --- that anti-Semitism was to a great extent, unfortunately, caused by the wrong teaching of the churches coming right out of the New Testament, but misrepresented, taken out of its context, and then fed to the people. And that stayed with us unfortunately, for 19 centuries, until things blew up. That of course refers to World War II.

Sept. 1, 1939, World War II broke out. Our town was on that very first day invaded. First the Polish Army that should have protected us retreated under chaotic conditions. We saw it - my sister and I were glued to the window, and we saw all these soldiers, cavalry, cannons, goats and sheep, and just a motley crowd of peasants and soldiers running - just running. They were running east toward Poland and toward Russia. Then Silence.

And after an hour of silence there came - we heard motor noises, and here came tanks, and here came the personnel carriers of the German Army. And the German Army never even stopped. They just drove through our town and across the bridge into Poland. And that was it. They were gone. Silence again for about half an hour or 45 minutes.

And then came the Occupation Army, and that was the S.S. You've heard of the S.S. - the soldiers in black uniforms, black boots, impeccably dressed. No resistance offered to them. They just came - in personnel carriers, motorcycles, cars. They came in, and we were occupied at that point by the Nazis.

It wasn't long - it was only one week, ten days at the most, before we were forced - we Jews - were forced to wear arm bands. White arm bands on our left arms with the blue Star of David printed on it. And if you go to the Web Site of UNCA, the library web site, you will find one dealing with the Holocaust, and there is the story of ten or twelve Holocaust survivors, and you'll find my story there [http://toto.lib.unca.edu/projects/Shoa/ziffer.htm], and you'll find pictures of me. And one picture dates from roughly 1940 probably, where I stand with a friend of mine being photographed, and we had the white arm band on.

Shortly after that, the arm bands were no longer used - that was replaced by a yellow star, on which was written Jude, the German word for Jew. We had to wear this on our left side, on our chest, and on the back of our coats.

So 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 to anyone could be done to us. I remember my family being tripped in the streets by kids 16 years old, laughing their heads off when these Jews fell on their faces and were scared to death. The Hitler Youth wore daggers in their belts, the leaders had pistols in their belts --and they were free to use all this, believe me

We were inducted into forced labor. I'll give you an example. One of the first things we had to do that fall was to rake leaves in various parks in our town. Our town was about half the size of Asheville, would be my guess. And so we raked the leaves. And another German outfit called the S.A., supervised us. So we raked leaves, put them on the piles; fire was set to these leaves, then we were forced to run around the walk ways in the park and to jump over these burning leaves. Now the older folks fell into these leaves and caught fire. And so we, the younger folks, of course tried to extinguish the fires. Chaotic situation. And the Germans standing there in their black boots, laughing their heads off while we suffered. Not only humiliation, but physical problems also like being kicked, pushed, and made fun of.

To condense things, let me give you one other example from that period.

My father was an attorney. He was also a very good photographer. He had two very expensive cameras at one point. His desk was filled with beautiful pictures. He enlarged them himself and developed them. At one point, after we were evicted from our first apartment - we were evicted four times before we were deported - A German S S officer came to our apartment, kicked the door open. They search your apartment. So he looks around and he sees on one shelf the two cameras of my father. He takes them, and he laughingly says to my father, "Well, these will be nice birthday gifts for my son." Walked out. So you are beyond the law. There is no one you can complain to. Anybody can do anything they want to you.

That was still before deportation. So my mother's little treasures that she had accumulated all of her married life disappeared. It all disappeared. We ended up with about one or two suitcases full of "stuff" -- clothing particularly.

It was during that time also that I fell in love for the first time. The little girl was 14 years old. Her name was Lydia. She was a beautiful girl - blond hair, green eyes - gorgeous. Her feelings must have been the same for me. We played ping-pong in the kitchen on a regular -- non-regulation ping-pong table. We also worked night shift in a factory. And so we walked to the station at that time hand-in hand. We got on the train, sat next to each other, put our cheeks together. My cheek was burning up, of course. Then we worked all night making bolts and nuts - that was in sort of an army-related factory, which kept us from being deported. At one point at that time we were already in the ghetto living. We were in a big hall. There were several halls, dance halls, actually, that they stuck us in. There was a stage there. My father, my father's family, and two other families, they were all on the stage. And so Lydia came one evening and said to me, "Walter," -- she was crying, weeping -- she said, "Walter, my father decided we will try to flee from this terrible situation and rejoin Russia," go east, in other words. Russia was still a free country at that time, and Jews were free there.

So she gave me her gold chain and a pendant, which when you twisted it spelled out, "I love you." Oh we wept, and we fell into each other's arms, of course - and then she left. My heart was broken, needless to say. My first love. Not puppy love, you know. Real love. Two weeks later, alas, some kind of a wandering Jew came by to the ghetto and called my father out. My father was in charge of the Jews there. The Gestapo had put him in charge. My father comes back from the little conversation, he was pale, white as a wall. We tried to get out of him what he had learned. We finally did. The story was, they had found Lydia and her parents shot, fifty miles east from our town. They were fleeing, and a German soldier patrol had intercepted them and shot them on sight. I have never, never overcome that sense of mourning I had for just a lovely young woman.

We were evicted, evicted, evicted, and we got to the ghetto that I mentioned. And on June 20, 1941, the loud speakers of the German army cars that drove around all the time, guarding us, bellowed out at us to have the next morning one suitcase ready because we would be transported and resettled in the east. That was the typical phrase, "Resettlement."

So we started packing. My mother did most of the packing I remember. She packed a suitcase for me. There was a piece of bread in there, my mother thinks, and a piece of salami. Still love it to this day. And that morning, all of the Jews were marching from the ghetto, getting together under guard, to an assembly place which happened to be an old junkyard. And there we were separated, men from women, aged, old folks, middle aged, and young folks. I was with the young people, of course. We had to hand over all our valuables to the SS soldiers who were sitting behind long tables, with whips on the tables, with revolvers on the tables. Some people handed over, some people didn't hand over, some people were searched, were found with some valuables, were beaten to a pulp. That was the first time I saw a person being kicked out of a barn, where they had searched him, with blood running all over him. That made also an indelible impression on me. I was scared to death. I was separated from my parents.

Then we just stood there. I was with a bunch of boys. And fifteen out of these boys I knew because we had worked together in that nuts and bolts factory that I mentioned. Out of sixteen - that includes me - two survived. One fellow survived and went to Israel and started working in a Kibbutz in the north of the country. I survived and went back to Czechoslovakia, and eventually left there after the War and went through Paris, lived in France for two years, and came to this country to Nashville, Tennessee.

So deportation happened on June 21, 1941. I was 14 years old. We had lost everything. And from here on I cannot possibly tell you all of the experiences in each one of the seven camps that I was herded through during almost four years. But I have to sort of telescope this experience, squeeze it together, and give you a typical picture of what happened to inmates like us.

First of all, we were crammed into cars -- wagons, trains. These were usually cattle cars. And when it was summer, in scorching heat -- and in Central Europe it gets very hot in summer -- or in winter, it gets very very cold -- we were open. Open cattle cars. And it snowed on us, and it rained on us. And by the time we arrived in the next camp, there were usually - at least toward the last two years of our being in prison - there were usually a few people dead. We were squeezed in like sardines. No hygiene possible. Nothing. You get into these cars, and the trains go off, destination unknown.

First camp, maybe two hours, we get off. This is typical now for just about every transfer at every camp. You arrive. The doors aren't just normally opened and you are asked to get out. No. On cattle cars you have two doors, one on each side. So both are opened. And now the SS with their dogs and their whips and their guns, the butts of the guns, start pushing the whole mass of people out. So basically you just fall out. Some of us jumped out and made it okay. Where you disembark there are SS soldiers with dogs that bark and snap at you, and they say, "'raus, 'raus, get out, get out! Schneller, schneller, Faster, faster!"

So everybody is out and you are lined up to march. Then you start marching, and you have no idea where you are going. Now going to the first camp, I still had the suitcase with the piece of wrapped-up salami, remember? And some underwear and stuff, you know? And we start marching. This was June and it was hot, and we marched, and we were driven on, faster and faster. The first person can no longer take it, throws their suitcase into the ditch. Within five minutes everybody's suitcase was in the ditch, because you cannot keep up with it, and the suitcase is heavy. You cannot walk with it. You can't march with it or run with it.

So we arrive at the camp. Many of the camps, not just Auschwitz, had a big inscription at the entrance, "Work Liberates!" Well it did "liberate" most of us -but up -- into chimneys, crematoria chimneys. That was the "liberation." Nobody got actually liberated as we understand liberation.

The next step as you arrive is you are herded into a wash barrack with the prisoners there already, and they cut your hair. They shave your head in some cases. In our particular case they clipped our hair, and that includes the body hair, everywhere. They clipped the hair about an eighth of an inch short, and then in this particular camp of Sakrow, they actually shaved a stripe about one inch wide from front to back. We used to call this the Lausallee - that means the alley for the lice to walk on, because soon we were infested with lice. And that's a terrible problem in itself.

Water: on occasions you can wash yourself --- on occasions. Soon you get filthy. Gradually you get more and more and more filthy. You have no underwear. Underwear was never given to us. We were given a pair of pants, a square piece of cloth instead of socks. We were given wooden shoes with tops that were made out of cloth; a pair of shoelaces, a shirt, and a jacket, and a beret type of hat. That was the blue-white striped stuff. And on the jacket was a number. And that's how you received your number. In some cases they tattooed you, but not in all camps. I was never tattooed. My father was tattooed. The cloth, the textile out of which the material was made, was of such a loose weave that if I went behind it and looked out, I would see all of you. It was cold material. The wind went right through it. As I said, never socks, never gloves, in winter. So you can use your imagination to understand what that was about.

Having been shaved, having been clothed as we were, you lose all your individuality. You're suddenly one of a mass, one of a mass of persons. Being herded into this washroom, I was 14 years old in the first camp. You have to undress. You're in the nude, of course. This had never happened to me before. In my family, every person guarded his/her individuality. I never saw my mother in the nude or my sister in the nude. Suddenly I am there, in the nude with hundreds of other people that are there. So I cannot describe to you the feeling of abandonment that I felt - for the first time without parents and in that hellhole.

I mentioned lice. Lice burrow under your skin. So every evening, at least during the last two years of my imprisonment, we'd look at each other and try to pull the lice off each other's skin. Because if you left a louse, or a piece of the louse in there, you became infected, of course, and when you became infected, that very often would spell the end of you, because you could no longer work. And so you were either sent to Auschwitz - all my camps were very close to Auschwitz - or you were sent to Gross Rosen, which happened to be my last camp, and they had a shooting wall there, and they lined up the sick people that were brought in, and they machined-gunned them and cremated them. And that was the end. So if the least little thing happened to you physically, that prevented you from working, you were as much as dead.

We slept on wooden platforms that were filled, in some cases, with loose straw, to sleep on, or sometimes filled with some burlap sacks that were filled with straw. With straw, of course, it deteriorates as you lie on it and becomes dust. In the second camp, which was really the most horrible camp, the German camp commander was a sadistic person. One of the tortures that he invented, he would have us at eleven o'clock, you'll all assemble with your two blankets beautifully folded. So all the prisoners come out, holding their two blankets. Then he comes out with his whip that long - leather with a piece of steel inside - and hits it. Hits the blankets. If the least little bit of dust came out of these blankets, you were beaten. You were publicly beaten in front of the whole assembly. And so, knowing that at eleven o'clock this would be happening, we would stand there for two hours and shake these covers, these blankets to get the dust out of them - because it was literally impossible to get it out. So that was just one means of torture.

Work: Work was extremely demanding. To give you an example, for instance, in one camp, I unloaded trains full of cement. All of us did. Cement sacks, 100 pounds. Do this, fifteen years old, all day long, 12 hours a day. Not only is it physically completely exhausting, but you become filthy. You become white all over. You come back to the camp. There's no water. And so you deteriorate. Your filth takes over more and more. In four years that I was in the camps, I have five changes of clothes. That's it. Five changes. That never included underwear. So you can imagine what we looked like. These were just rags that we walked around in.

In the last camp, to give you an idea of work, we were drilling holes in the bed rock for a German company, a huge company, similar to Dupont or General Motors in America. So we were standing during the last winter on bedrock, and we had between the two of us -- two people working together -- a rod, a steel rod about that big in diameter, and we stand there and lift the rock about a foot, a foot and a half, and let it drop. We lift it, we twist it a bit, we let it drop. We lift it, we twist it, we let it drop. So eventually, after maybe four hours of work, a hole is made that is about that deep. Then we are evacuated. The Germans got into it with dynamite to blow it up. And a new level of bedrock is exposed. Then the work begins again.

But - how do we do this? We must not talk to each other. If we are caught saying anything to each other, there's the whip that lands on your back. And that hurt, let me tell you. I had one experience with it that I'll never forget. You are insulted. The butt of the gun is rammed into your back. You are just an object. You become a number. My number is 64, 767, and that followed me from camp to camp to camp to camp. I was no longer Walter Ziffer. I was an object. Once you are made into an object, anybody can do anything with you. An object can be disposed of in many ways. That includes murder, gassing, and cremation.

In one camp I unloaded bombs - 100 pound bombs. You are constantly insulted at the same time. The German word that I heard most often was, "dreckiges Judenschwein" - which means you filthy Jew swine. We heard that day and night, day and night. And so you finally, you know, you start believing it, because your brains no longer work correctly, and you succumb to that indoctrination.

Food: Let me tell you what food was about. After the war, we found out that we were supposed to have gotten 14 ounces of bread per day. Well, the bread was usually picked up by a fellow prisoner for his particular building or barracks or room or whatever. And then we lined up. And a prisoner or two prisoners would usually cut the bread. They were round breads, and they were usually cut into eight pieces. Now, as you walked by, the person who cut the bread looked at you. If he liked you, well, he cut the bread a little larger. Well, you can get only eight pieces out of one loaf of bread. That means somebody else got less than that. So some of us ended up with ten ounces or eleven ounces. And that was ALL the solid food for a day! For a day. In the evening we got the bread, and with it we got some black "coffee," we called it. It wasn't coffee. It was black water, basically. Lukewarm stuff. In the morning, just black water then, we got the same stuff, "coffee."

At noon, we were out on the construction site, because most the work was done on the construction site. But the same thing happened. Kettles were there. They had ladles. Again, as you walk by, the guy looks at you, and if he likes you, he'll dig deep down and you'll get a bowl full of potato peels, beet peels, and water -soup -- pretty good stuff. But if he didn't like you, if he disliked you, he'd take it from the top, you got a bunch of water with four peels sitting on the top. You can't survive on a diet like that. And what happens, is, that not only does your body disintegrate, it feeds on itself, as it were. The protein that you have in your body is consumed by the body itself. But not only the physical body. But your mind goes to pot. You can no longer process information. So it's a gradual deterioration.

That pretty much takes care of what happened in the camp -in most camps. Except that in certain camps, of course, there were selections, and people were being selected for murder, for gassings, and for cremation. In some other cases they were shot on the spot, and what have you.

So let me end this up - we are pretty much running out of time here.
My second camp was a camp by the name of Branden. It was a slave labor camp. And I mentioned to you this terrible German supervisor, this Commandant. What he did is the following thing. When we woke up in the morning to be counted --that happened in every camp. Counting. Counting. Re-counting. Because people were dying during the night. People were dying on construction sites. And when I say dying - they were murdered; they died from exhaustion. So the numbers were changing. So we had to recount constantly. Now imagine standing there at attention, and being counted and recounted. So you need to go to the bathroom. That can happen. Now you can't lift up your finger and say, "Sir. I want to go to the bathroom." That was impossibility. So the people who couldn't control themselves urinated into their pants, or did the other thing. And in winter time, to give you an example just of the horror of all of it, the urine would trickle down your legs into your boots and to the ground, and you would freeze to the ground. And when the command came, "Turn Right, March!" they were frozen to the ground. And so, other prisoners would step up, and they would hit their shoes with our shoes, and they would loosen them, and then what happened was that under one shoe, that person may have had that much ice and snow build up, and under the other shoe there is nothing, so you start limping. And you have to walk for 45 minutes to the construction site, and you fall, and there is nobody there who can pick you up. And people march right over you. And whoever is left over is shot. So when we went by, the column had passed, we heard these dull sounds, shooting, and we knew that the people who had fallen down had been shot in the neck, and they were gone.

Also, every morning in that particular camp, between ten and fifteen people were selected by this particular man. He walked through the ranks, and with his whip he would hit you over the head, you'd have to step out, hit you over the head, you'd have to step out. And so it grew to 14 people roughly. These people were marched off to the wash barracks. And then we heard loud screaming. I was new in the camp. I asked my fellow prisoners, "What's going on?" No answer. Nobody would talk about it. One day I was in camp - by the way, nobody worked in that camp. This was called a "convalescent" camp. I was picked up by camp police people with three other boys. We were marched off to the wash barracks. And what we saw was 14 people lying there in blood, in filth, in excrement, in urine, in the most bizarre positions. Death.

We had to pick up these corpses, put them on a two-wheeled cart, cart them into the woods, and dump them into a mass grave. Then we were taken back and had to clean up the wash barracks. And what had happened, as I gradually found out, is, that camp commander by the name of Pompet - and I have looked for that guy for a long time, never could find him anymore after the war - he lost, disappeared - these people were showered with ice cold water and alternately were thrown at with boiling water. Because the laundry for the German guards was done there by the prisoners, so there were big vats of hot boiling water. So they would take big pots and just pour them, throw them at these prisoners, and beat them in between until these poor people expired. Imagine where all the filth came from in that kind of situation.

So we have Auschwitz-one and a half million people killed there. Other camps - Treblinka… But there were over 10,000 prisoner camps in Germany during the Hitler period - not just Jewish camps, but German camps and also other camps, people handicapped, and so forth

On the eighth of May we were lined up again to go work in the camp of Gross Rosen in Waldenburg. I looked up at the towers where the machine guns were, and there were no soldiers up there. It did not occur to me what may have happened. You see, when you cannot eat anything for four years, when you are so malnourished, when your brain no longer functions, you cannot absorb. You cannot process the information. There were no soldiers up there. After a while the triple gate of the fence opened, and the camp commander SS officer came in, walked up to the internal camp commander, who was a Jewish man, and said something to him. I don't know what. He had this grin on his face. He walked all along out of the camp, and when he was outside of the gate, he took his key chain from his belt, - key ring, actually, his keys, and threw them back into the camp.

We had no idea what that meant, because we couldn't process the information. So we still stood there and waited and waited. And then we heard a rolling, loud, and a machine-type sound, a motor-type sound, coming closer and closer, and lo and behold a Russian tank! And that single Russian tank drives into the triple fence and breaks it up. Smashes it. And goes on! Never stops! I remember the Russian soldier in the turret of the tank. We were free! The fence was down. But we couldn't understand it. We couldn't make out what had happened to us. So we stood there for another half hour. And then finally the guy who stood next to me said, "I think something important has happened. I think we're free." So, I said to him, "Let's get some food."

So he agreed with that. The ranks were breaking up at that point. So he and went downtown into the city of Waldenburg , where we had marched to every day. It was a totally abandoned city. And there was a truck sitting there - an army truck. So we climbed on the truck, he and I. And there were cans - German military ration cans - in the truck. And there were three or four white sacks in the truck as well. So we produced a screw driver, punched holes into these cans, pried open the tops, and what we found was white grease. We smelled it, but the grease smelled good. So we ate that grease. Underneath there were chunks of meat. It was pork! And so we opened can after can after can, and shoveled that food - hands, of course --into our mouths. Then he went in and popped open those white sacks. It was granulated sugar. It spilled into the truck bed. And we shoveled the sugar into our mouths. And then everything went black.

And I woke up. I was in a bed between two white sheets. And I looked at the opposite wall and there was a cuckoo clock there. And I said to myself, where am I? In Hell they don't have cuckoo clocks. So maybe I am in the other place. Maybe it's not the other place. Maybe it's just the world again. In the meantime, this friend of mine woke up too. We found out later on that we had slept for 36 hours. We were out. Completely out. And then the door opened, and a little woman in a black dress came in. She saw my eyes were open. She sat down on the bed, and she said to me, "Now everything is over; we lost the war. We are finished." Well, do you think I jumped out of bed and started to do a dance? No. I just didn't understand what happened. Couldn't process the information. Slowly, gradually, it got to us that we were free. And we stayed with this woman for three or four days. She cooked enormous pots of soups for us - beets and potatoes, and we ate and we ate and we ate and we ate. That was our greatest preoccupation - to get food. We never thought of revenge. Never. .

Eventually, we went to some of the abandoned halls of the city, to the basements. The Germans had left, basically. The place was abandoned. We got clothes. We threw away our pajama-like outfits. We really didn't know what to do with ourselves. And this is a lesson for all of us here: freedom is something that demands decisions. That demands obligations. That demands some kind of an idea of what you want to do with it. And those ideas don't fall ready-made from the tree, you know. So we didn't know what to do. So the best thing we knew how to do was to go back to the camp! Can you imagine that? Back into that old Hell.

But it wasn't exactly the same hell anymore, obviously. There were some fires burning here and there. People were roasting potatoes. There was some bread here - roasted bread. And we ate. And then women started coming to the camp. And I was so shy, you know. At one point three women were standing in the camp. I walked up to them, really cranked up my courage. I said, "Excuse me, could you tell me whether, during your camp experience, wherever that may have been, did you ever run into some women whose name was Ziffer?" One woman looked at me and said, "Of course! There were two Ziffer people in the barracks in our camp!" "I said, "Where is your camp?" The camp was a camp by the name of Langenbielau, which was roughly 30 kilometers from our camp.

And so I went out to the town. I saw a German on his bicycle. I told him, "Stop. Get off the bike." You know, I am not very tall, as you can see. He was much bigger than I. But we looked like apparitions from Hell. Scary! So he got off the bike. I got on the bike. And it took me two days to go 30 kilometers. That is roughly -16 miles, 15 miles. Something like that. I arrived at the camp where the Ziffer women were. The women, let me tell you - they were so much smarter than the men. They already had pretty good food. I arrived at the barracks where my mother was supposed to have been. They told me my mother wasn't there. Good stuff! That shows you, women are superior to men, despite what the Rabbis and some other people tell you.

So I waited, and I was from the door about the same distance as from here to the door. I sat there and waited, happily fed. And the door opened and here my mother and my sister and a cousin of mine walked in. They looked horrible. No hair. They were skeletons too. They walked by the bench where I was sitting. They sort of nodded - no idea who I was. They walked to the end of the barrack, started unloading their pockets and paper sacks with food. They had organized food. That was the camp word for getting food, was "organizing food." So I walked over into the corner to them, and I introduced myself. And that, of course, did it. The pieces of the puzzle fell together. And we were united at that point.

And I think I'm going to stop here, because at this point a new chapter in my life began, of course. Very interesting chapter, which brought me to Mars Hill College, for which I will be eternally grateful. From here on, I think you have time for two minutes of questions. Am I right?

Kathy Meacham: Thanks toLucia Carter for imagining this, and organizing this. As the women organized food, Dr. Carter organized this event. Thanks to the students who did their research in preparation. And especially our thanks to you. And our President of Academic and Student Affairs, Dr. Nina Pollard, has a token of our appreciation.

Nina Pollard: We have for you this plaque. This says, "Mars Hill College, with deep gratitude to Walter Ziffer for outstanding teaching…… April 2006.

Questions:

Question: You talked about 10,000 camps. Were these all death camps?

Ziffer: I talked about 10,000 camps in Germany. This was not just in Germany proper, but also in occupied territories that Germany took over - Poland and Belgium and France and Holland, Russia --- no they were not all extermination camps. But that does not necessarily mean that tens of thousands of people didn't die there. What we call "extermination camp" is a camp, for instance, such as Auschwitz, where people were brought in with the express purpose of extermination. They were killed. Some people in Auschwitz. Some never worked. They were simply murdered by being gassed. The daily number of people gassed went into the thousands, believe it or not. These were express extermination camps, and the bodies were destroyed by cremation. But many other camps -the number of camps I mentioned included prisoner of war camps. So for instance when we marched to work, we very often ran into columns of Russian prisoners. And you cannot imagine what these people looked like! They probably looked just as we did! In the camps there were no mirrors. I never really could see myself except after the war.
But they were in rags. They were hunger starved. Their legs were gone in many cases, and they had just like a piece of two by four stuck out for a leg, and they limped along. These were horrible sights. So these camps included all the people who in one way or another resisted - whether they were Germans - like Dachau was a camp not made for Jews to begin with. It was made for German people who resisted Hitler. So all kinds of camps. But all prisoners. And the losses in these 10,000 camps was absolutely enormous.

Could you compare leaders of Iran today to the threat in 1938 of leaders of Germany?

Ziffer: Well….Hitler is often considered to have been a madman. And there are some stories out there comparing Ahmadinejad to Hitler - that he also is a madman. I don't know whether he is or not. I have no idea. I think the threat is absolutely real and should be taken very seriously, in my opinion. How to deal with the threat is another story. I don't have a clue. What they are doing right now, which is extremely disquieting to many of us, is the support of Hamas, of the Palestinian anti-Israeli group in what they call Palestine. It seems that he has recently promised them $50,000, because Hamas is in very bad straits financially. They have been cut of from European help, as well as from Israeli tax money, as well as U.S.A. help. So we really have no idea where this is going. Obviously the Iran danger is not just one that threatens Israel. That danger threatens us as well. I have no idea how advanced their nuclear project is, how the delivery system is, how advanced that is. I have no idea. But I would not underestimate the man. Absolutely. That's all I can say.

What was your relationship with death? Because you are of the Jewish religion, what was the situation about death? How did you deal with knowing that you might die today?

Ziffer: Did you all hear the question? I am exposed to death every day - how can I relate to that kind of a situation? You know, there are two things that happened in these camps, one which can be called almost positive, the other negative. One is that your individuality is almost totally destroyed. That's one thing. To make this more real, every so often, every six months or so, a German SS officer would come to all these camps, and he would make these "selections." That means we would line up. All of us would line up. And then this German officer would come in and again pull this person out, this other person out. I don't know what their criteria was. I have no idea. But many of these people were pulled out to go to Auschwitz to be gassed - to be finished off. Others were transferred to other camps. Fortunately in my case, -- I was in seven camps over those four years -I was transferred to other camps. So when that man arrived, we were trembling. We were scared to death. Because we knew this could be a selection to die. So that's one side of it.

But 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 were able to absorb less and less information processing. We also became more and more immune to that kind of thing, because we couldn't process it. We became zombies. And so. toward the end, as we saw things happen, we just stood there as a bunch of objects. We were diminished to have become objects. We couldn't think. There wasn't all that much fear in us at that point. So during the first two years the fear was pronounced. I was scared to death every time this terrible guy showed up. It was always the same man, by the way. I never could figure that out. But toward the end, 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. So you see, the balance, as things got worse, our brains were turned off. And here I think I'm speaking for most concentration camp victims.

Let me also say that for instance my father, who was a really highly educated person, he was an attorney. But He was also a mathematician. He was an excellent chess player. He knew music. He was one of these Renaissance Men really. For him, I think, the experience of being inducted into the concentration camp Hell at age 50 plus was considerably worse than for me. Because I was a youngster, I didn't bring much intellectual or religious baggage to that whole enterprise. But he did. I cannot imagine how he suffered through this. He survived, by the way - against all expectations. When we came back to our home town, he was already there, because he had been in an out- camp, a peripheral camp of Auschwitz called Blechhammer. The Russian army had liberated them before they came to us.

My father, let me tell you, after the war really did not say much about his concentration camp experience. I think he was so demolished, so turned off by the lack of humanity of people who brought this about, that he became silent. That evolved into a strange relationship. Before the war my father was my idol. I loved him to pieces. I wanted to be just like him. I admired him and everything he said and did. After the war we became alienated. We were still friends. I still saw in him my beloved father. But we didn't have much of a relationship at that point because both of us had been influenced by this terrible experience. And so, when we talk about the camps, we usually talk just about that. But there were many things that happened subsequent to liberation, because people's lives had been ruined. I can tell you a few stories from my family that are absolutely heart-breaking, on what happened to them because of this. Sad sad stories.

I've heard you tell at least one anecdote of where you found hope, through people helping you.

Ziffer: I'll tell you that story, because that is the only story where somebody showed some interest in me, or perhaps stronger, a bit of compassion. I was in one camp working on a machine that bent structural iron into various shapes that go into concrete. That was an easy job, by the way. It did not take a lot of physical strength. I was grateful for the job - although that machine had killed a boy just before I took the job. Still, I was very happy to get it. The German, the chief of the little group of workers, who was in charge of that project, came up to me. "Come follow me," he said, "to my office. It's a little small wooden building. So I walked in with him, and he pulled out some blue prints, and he tried to show me how these rebars, some thick, some thinner, would have to be modified.

So he says this to me, and I respond to what he says in German. Now that is my native language. I spoke German at home. At age 12 I was familiar with most -not with most, but with many a German piece of literature. Because my father had read this stuff and always gave me the right books to read. So I responded in perfect German. And he is speechless at that point! He starts nodding his head. I looked at him and said nothing. He looked at me and said, "You're not a Jew!" I said, "Oh yes I am." I didn't smile. I said, "Yes I am." very seriously. He said, "No, no, you're not a Jew. That's impossible." I said, "Yes I am. That's why I'm here, unfortunately." He said, "Jews can't speak German. So you can't be a Jew." So you see what I'm talking about.

Here's a prejudice an indoctrination that is unbelievable. Jews are Untermenschen during the Nazi time, which means sub-humans who cannot learn. I mean Wagner, who was a great musician, said Jewish music is worth nothing. It is just a "howling" that is going on in the synagogues. Crazy stuff! So I said, "Yes, I'm a Jew." So he kept on nodding, doing this with his hand, he gets up, goes to a closet, and pulls out his lunch box, and gives me a sandwich. Two stale pieces of bread with margarine in between. And dismisses me. Why? I don't know. . . .

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