PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – Eighty years ago on Jan. 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz and uncovered the horrors of the Holocaust.
The day now also known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day honors the six million Jews killed in the massacre, nearly one million of which were murdered at the Nazi death camp. It comes amid a drastic rise in antisemitism and a little more than a year after October 7th, the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
After the war, multiple Jewish families settled in the Pittsburgh area in search of the American Dream. We got to speak with two of them, who survived the Holocaust and passed through Auschwitz, so they could share their stories and make sure we never forget.
Growing up in Pittsburgh, Max Gelernter quickly realized not to take things for granted.
“I learned from my grandparents, that life is not guaranteed,” Max said.
Through the years, he heard and read the stories of his grandparents, who were both survivors of the Holocaust.
Born in Lodz, Poland, Max’s grandfather, Simon, was just 13, when the Germans invaded the country and created ghettos in 1939.
Simon’s mom had already died from a stroke a year earlier after Kristallnacht, when the Nazis burned and destroyed synagogues in Germany.
Around the same time, one of Simon’s two older brothers died from malnutrition.
“As we were looking for food items, we got the shock of our lives. On a plate, we found several human ears. We were so disgusted and frightened that we left this apartment,” Simon said in a handwritten testimony.
In 1944, the Nazis placed them in a cattle car with no windows or food and took them to Auschwitz.
“He remembers that there was an orchestra playing music as they arrived,” Max said.
When they got off, Simon’s father was sent to the left, and he and his brother were sent to the right.
“When I asked the commando where my father is, he pointed to the billowing smoke from the crematorium, that’s where your father went,” Simon said in handwritten testimony.
Simon feared he would be next. His future wife, Francine, Max’s grandmother, could have also faced the gas chambers. Born in Lithuania, she was sent to a camp north of Poland, when one day the Nazis transported her to Auschwitz.
“When her cattle car arrived, they said, we have nowhere to put these people, because we can’t kill fast enough, and so the train went back to Stutthof,” Max said.
She experienced her own evil, like Simon, who remembered doing labor work like smashing rocks, being packed in the barracks like sardines with rations of food, and being beaten and tortured.
That too was the case for 21-year-old Melvin Goldman, who also went to the death camp from the Lodz ghetto. At one point, he had six teeth knocked out.
Lee Goldman Kikel is Melvin’s daughter.
“He said if he thought that the Lodz ghetto was bad, this was horrendous, and this was hell,” Lee said.
Unlike Max, Lee learned her father’s story from audio recordings nearly 20 years after his death in 1996.
“You smelled something, you couldn’t feel, but you knew deep down that it smelled like human flesh,” Melvin said in his recordings.
Melvin and one of his brothers were spared. His parents and five other siblings were gassed.
“He said that he would think to himself, he never knew if he was going to live to see the next day,” Lee said.
However, he did see another day, along with Simon, who both got out of Auschwitz and were sent to multiple other concentration camps, where they continued to go on death marches and experienced failing health, each weighing less than 90 lbs.
Eventually, they were liberated from those camps more than three months after the same happened at Auschwitz in January 1945. Simon was 18 years old. Melvin was 22.
“They said, ‘You will probably never walk again,’ and my dad said, ‘Well, I’m either going to walk and do this on my own or I’m not going to be here,'” Lee said.
After receiving treatment and rehabilitation for a few years and figuring out their next steps, they made their way to America and Pittsburgh. Simon went on to hang drapes in homes, and Melvin became a jeweler.
According to the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, they were two of more than 350 survivors who came to the region.
“My grandfather told my dad, if you have to eat sand or grass, whatever you have to eat, whatever you have to do, you have to stay alive so that somebody of the family survives,” Lee said.
While it was difficult for Melvin to express what he went through, he saved his bracelet from Auschwitz until the day he died.
“He was no longer a name, just a number,” Lee said.
It’s a reminder of the atrocity millions of Jews went through all those years ago, and the fight that continues today.
“Times can be very dark, but it’s something very core to, you know, the Jewish community. How do we make those memories a blessing?” Max said. “Through this darkness, the light will shine through.”
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