Survivors share memories
By Kurt Esposito
Assistant
Campus Editor
"Never, never again."
Czeslaw Kentzer, a former Purdue professor and
a non-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, said he would never want to
experience something like the Holocaust again.
He spoke on Saturday night as part of "Jewish and
Non-Jewish Survivors," which featured four speeches about Jewish and
Non-Jewish experiences during the Holocaust.
Kentzer was a member of the Polish resistance army
but was captured and forced to work in a shoe factory as a slave laborer.
He was not allowed to work in the concentration camps because he looked
sickly, had swelled joints and had the proper papers.
"I was one of the lucky ones," said Kentzer.
He said that in one of the public executions he
witnessed, victims had concrete poured into their mouths so no one would
hear them scream.
The event also featured speeches by Sidney Iwens,
a Jewish Holocaust survivor and author of the book "How Dark the Heavens:
1,400 Days in the Grip of Nazi Terror," Joseph Bota, a non-Jewish survivor,
and Robert Melson, a Jewish survivor and professor of political science.
Iwens was living in Lithuania when he was captured
by German soldiers and taken to a concentration camp.
He told a story of how all the Jews in the camp
were lined up and groups of twenty were taken through a set of iron
gates.
"We heard rifle shots and we knew they were dead,"
said Iwens.
Along with three other people, he hid while the
shootings were going on and he and his group were the only people that
survived that day.
He skipped some parts of his planned speech; explaining
to the audience that he did not want to talk about those events as he
wiped tears from his eyes.
"I am the only survivor of my entire family," said
Iwens.
Bota told the story of his experience growing up
during World War II in Hungary. His Catholic father was raised by a
Jewish family, became a prominent businessman and refused when asked
to join the Nazi party.
Bota said when he was a boy, he would deliver groceries
that had been bought by his father to a Jewish family that was refused
service in a local grocery store. He did it for a few months until one
day military trucks came and took all of the Jewish families away.
"I do not know of one family that came back after
the war," he said.
Melson talked about his new book, "False Papers,"
which tells the story of his parents during the Holocaust. They used
false papers to pretend they were Polish Noblemen and saved themselves
from being persecuted.
The Polish family they were impersonating came
from a prominent Polish background, so they had to live extravagantly
to keep up the ruse.
They lived next door to a German colonel who was
convinced they were a Jewish family and would brag to them about how
many Jews he had executed during the day.
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