COPYRIGHT Winchester Star
Posted Oct 28, 2010 @ 04:15 PM
Winchester, MA —
One of the worst moments of Eliezer Ayalon’s life came when the German guard, with one swift swoop, smacked away his one worldly possession — a small, porcelain cup.
It happened at his first of five concentration camps, Blyzin, in the spring of 1943.
“The first thing that happens when you come to a new camp: there’s a roll call,” Ayalon, now in his eighties, told a capacity crowd at Tufts University’s Cabot Hall. “We were all to put our belongings on the ground to be taken away.”
Ayalon’s cup was a cherished possession: the last thing his mother had given to him before they parted forever at the ghetto gates in his hometown of Radom, Poland.
“I was trying to hide this cup,” Ayalon remembered, the pain and emotion of the moment still evident in his strong but measured voice. “I curled my finger around it. And then a guard with a stick in hand approached me, and before I was able to explain to him that this is an empty cup, he smacked my hand and it fell to the ground and broke into pieces.
“The blow from the stick stung, but my eyes watered for that cup. This was the only thing that I had from my mother and my home, and I was so sad it was no longer with me,” he continued.
The next day, Ayalon came back to the site of the roll call, hoping desperately to find even a tiny broken piece of his mother’s final gift. There was nothing there. There was nothing anywhere, except hunger, sadness and death — the three consistent forces that followed him relentlessly on a three-year journey to hell and back.
Sixty-five years later, Ayalon tells his story whenever he has the chance, to as many people as he can. He tells it with honesty, emotion and gusto — not because it’s easy to relieve the nightmares, but because he is the only person in his family who lived to tell it, and one of a dwindling number of Holocaust survivors who take it upon themselves to keep on speaking until there are no voices left.
Ayalon, who now works as a tour guide at the Holocaust Museum in Israel, was brought to Tufts last Tuesday to tell his story last Tuesday by Winchester resident Bill Cummings, who recently announced he will be donating $1 million from his Beacon Grille Restaurant in Woburn to establishing a Holocaust education program at the university.
Invasion
The youngest of four children, Ayalon said he had a “joyful life” before Nazis invaded Radom on Friday, Sept. 8, 1939.
The Germans wasted little time in forcing every Jew over age 10 to wear the star of David, and began to separate them from non-Jewish Poles by prohibiting them from going to the movies, theaters or places of worship.
Ayalon never thought that, in the months and years ahead, he would look back at this time or discrimination fondly.
“To share our happiness and suffering together was not bad,” he said. “This little apartment, our home, bound us. It was safe and warm.”
Life changed forever seven months later, when Ayalon and his family were packed into a ghetto with 22,000 other Jews in a neighborhood where just 7,000 Poles had lived before.
Surrounded by barbed wire, guarded by sentries with machine guns, the ghetto was a miserable slum, Ayalon said, where he and other Jews “alternated between the desperate struggle of survival and death from starvation.”
Opportunity to earn money knocked when the Germans “interviewed” 2,000 young men ages 15 and older for 100 jobs outside the ghetto in a German war factory.
Though Ayalon was just 13, he did something that would save his life over and over in the coming years: came to attention when spoken to and shouted a crisp, robust reply.
“I shouted, ‘I’m 15’ so convincingly that he had no doubt,” Ayalon remembered, a defiant smile crossing his face.
Ayalon’s job was his salvation. It kept him out of the camp six days per week, and when he returned from making the uniforms, boots and helmets for the German soldiers, it was at least with money and bread in his pockets.
In August 1942, however, things changed again when it was rumored the entire population — except those with work permits, like Ayalon — would be sent east for a “resettlement.”
“I said, ‘I am staying here. Whatever happens to you will happen to me.
“My mother insisted I had to go back. She approached me every few minutes and put her hands on my shoulders and said, ‘You have to go back.’”
Ayalon lost the argument, and on the last afternoon they would share on this earth, mother and son walked slowly to the ghetto gates.
“As we stepped outside, I noticed that my mother was trying to hide something under the scarf she was wearing,” he remembered. “All I wanted was — if I could only stop the clock. I wanted time to slow so I could stay with my mother a little longer,” he said, his heavy words tinged with longing.
“I knew that once I got outside the ghetto, I would never see my mother again.”
Though he pleaded with his mother during the short walk to the gate, she never wavered.
“She pleaded with me to go, and admitted for the first time that we might be separated.”
Then came the words that stick to him to this day.
“As we approached the exit gate, she turned to me and said … ‘If there’s anyone in this family with a chance to survive, it will be you. You will survive.’
“My mothers words were soothing,” said Ayalon. “She had this magical way to make the hurt and the pain fade away.”
As she spoke, she handed him what had been concealed under her scarf: a small white porcelain cup, covered with a length of cloth secured with a piece of string.
“She said to me, take this cup with you. You will have a sweet life, because it was meant to be.
“I took the cup, hugged my mother and left the ghetto.”
Hell
The night he left, those in the ghetto were sent to Treblinka, the largest death camp in Poland.
Two weeks later, Poles at his work told him they heard that Treblinka was a place where Jews were gassed to death.
“We discounted all this information because we didn’t want to believe that our families were dead,” Ayalon said. “They were dead.”
However, when Ayalon was allowed a few hours to collect some things one day at the ghetto, he raced home and found that his father and one brother were among about 1,000 Jews who had been left behind to clean the ghetto.
“My father believed that my mother and the rest of the family would come back soon,” Ayalon said.
In January 1943, his father and brother were sent to Treblinka. Ayalon never saw anyone from his family again, and soon he was sent himself to a concentration camp, called Blyzin.
He was told by inmates to tell the Germans he had some skill to avoid hard labor in stone quarries.
“I decided that I was going to be a shoemaker,” he said — something he willed himself to learn in three days.
Life began with a 5 a.m. wake-up whistle, at the sound of which he and the others with whom he shared a thin straw mattress and blanket rose with groans in their bellies to face breakfast of brown cold water.
After all the prisoners were counted in a process that took hours, Ayalon worked until noon, when a lunch of watery soup with the occasional potato skin was served.
Dinner was a loaf of bread split with five others.
“I couldn’t wait for the bread every day. I remember watching with hungry eyes and wondering, ‘What part of the bread will I get today? The middle part, or the edge?”
The worst moments were those in which inmates had to pass a “selection” process in which one man would decide the fate of another with the flick of his wrist.
“I had this tremendous willpower … to remain on the side of the living,” said Ayalon, spurred by the words of his mother. “I did everything possible to survive.”
During a selection, Ayalon would stand in a long line of prisoners, each of which would stand in front of a Nazi physician to learn if they were healthy enough to work or should be killed.
“He would notify you in a split second with a flick of his thumb. Left, right. Left, right. Without saying a single word.”
Ayalon whispered a prayer before every selection and acted the same way each time.
“I stood stiffly, removed my jacket and shouted, ‘Shoemaker” — ‘schuster’ in German — and within a split second his thumb would move to the direction of the living, and I darted there like a rabbit.”
This continued for four more camps. First there was Plaszow — made famous by the film “Schindler’s List” — where Ayalon witnessed notorious murderer Amon Goeth randomly and without warning trot around and shoot prisoners in the head from atop his large white horse.
In one particularly heinous act, he forced 18,000 people to witness the brutal execution of a 16-year-old Jew caught “stealing” two potatoes from a kitchen.
Though he tried to turn away, the guards struck Ayalon with a pole and forced him to watch as the boy was tied to a pole and attacked by two large dogs
“Within a few minutes, this boy was torn into pieces until he stopped crying,” he said. “Killing in this camp was sport.”
The same baseless cruelty continued in August 1944, when he was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and given a new “identity.”
“This was my name,” he said, holding a piece of paper high for the audience to read, on which was written the number 84,991.“I was not a human being, but a number.”
Though it’s been 65 years, Ayalon didn’t need to look at the paper to remember the digits.
Every day, guards would get drunk, he said, and for their own amusement approach a prisoner, cover the number printed on their clothes and order them to recite their “name.”
If they failed, they were often beaten to death. “I had to repeat this number to myself every minute of the day.”
After a few more transfers — including a nearly three-day death march in which those who lagged behind were shot on site — he arrived at Ebensee, where 350 people were being killed per day in gas chambers as Allied forces crept closer.
“I could smell the stench at night. I could see the chimneys pouring out dark smoke,” said Ayalon, who at this point was so emaciated he would feel his ribs every day to see how much skin was left.
“I was a walking skeleton … [but] I would not give up.
“My mothers words were always here,” he said, pointing to his head with both hands. “She said I would survive and have a sweet life.”
Heaven
On May 6, 1945, three hours after the camp’s commanders and guards fled in cowardice, a beige American tank burst through the entrance gate to Ebensee.
“To me they were not American soldiers,” said Ayalon, who actually got a chance to meet one of his liberators last year in Detroit, Mich. “To me they were angels that came down from heaven to save our lives.
“I stood there and pinched my arms to make sure this was not a dream.”
Horrified at what they saw, the soldiers emptied their pockets of everything — cigarettes, gum, biscuits — and gave them to 13,000 “skeletons” that lay before them.
Although many died from overeating, Ayalon said food wasn’t his end goal. Instead, he wanted a shower, a toothbrush, underwear — something that would “make me feel human.”
He settled for the jacket of German cook. He ripped off the swastika, put it on and ate ravenously but in moderation — somehow — and was taken to Italy.
“I was 17 years old and 55 pounds. That was me.”
Ayalon went on to accomplish his dream — raising a family that now includes two married children, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
His wish for the future is simple.
“My life is a continuing defeat to the Nazis, to Hitler,” he said, pointing at the college students who lined the sides of the hall as every seat was taken.
“For 37 years I kept everything inside,” before a friend convinced him to speak of the atrocities he witnessed. “I wish to make an appeal to you today: make sure that genocides never happen again,” he said forcefully. “Speak out against racism, against baseless hatred.
“We have seen how silence could kill millions of people,” he said. “I decided as long as I can stand on my feet I will continue to speak, to remind people that this can never happen again.”
After the event, he thanked Cummings for his $1 million pledge to the Holocaust Education program, which is expected to bring other noted speakers to the university as well as sponsor trips to countries affected by genocide.
Before he concluded, Ayalon took out a porcelain cup he bought 15 years ago in his hometown, and told the audience a little more about the cup his mother gave him six decades ago.
As he walked away from the his mother for the last time in 1942, Ayalon said he looked inside the cup she had given him when she told him he would have a “sweet life.”
“I was shocked. Of all things, the cup was full of honey. Honey,” he said. “I hadn’t seen honey for a long time.
“Where did my mother get the honey? I don’t know to this very day.”
Ayalon has since taken the honey as a metaphor for his life.
“I put this piece of cloth with the string exactly how my mother gave it to me,” he said, holding the small white cup from Radom in his hands gingerly. “To me this is the authentic cup. And it is not empty,” he said with emotion.
“There is still honey in it. And that honey is spreading out over and over to other people, and they will fill their cups with that honey from my mother.
“My life is the honey that is flowing over and over.”
Copyright 2010 The Winchester Star. Some rights reserved
