How to Go:
What: The Dayton Area Yom Hashoah Observance: A Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust.
When: 4 p.m. today. Admission is free/
Where: Beth Abraham Synagogue, 305 Sugar Camp Circle, Oakwood.
Speaker: John Koenigsberg, a native of Amsterdam who spent three years hiding from thr Nazis and living with a Catholic family. Works from the annual Max May and Lydia May Memorial Holocaust Art and Writing Contest will be on display beginning at 3 p.m. and student winners will be honored during the program.
Sponsored by: The Yom Hashoah Committee, a project of the Jewish Federation’s Jewish Community Relations Council and the Holocaust Committee.
VIDEO: To hear Sam Heider talk about his experiences at Auschwitz, see MyDaytonDailyNews.com.
One of the most heart-wrenching moments of Dayton’s annual Holocaust memorial is the prayer offered by survivor Samuel Heider.
As he chants “El Maley Rachamim,” a Hebrew prayer for the peace of six million departed souls, Heider recites the names of six notorious Nazi concentration camps. Among them are the camps in which his parents, three sisters, two brothers and a nephew perished.
Heider will chant his memorial prayer this afternoon at the “Dayton Area Yom Hashoah Observance: A Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust.” Open to the public, the free community event will take place at 4 p.m. at Beth Abraham Synagogue in Oakwood and will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.
Guest speaker will be John Koenigsberg, a native of Amsterdam who spent three years hiding from the Nazis and living with a Catholic family. He now resides in Columbus.
Heider, who turned 91 on April 5, is one of two known living concentration camp survivors in the Miami Valley. After surviving five years living in a ghetto and three concentration camps — Radom, Auschwitz and Dachau — he was liberated on April 30, 1945. By that time, the strapping young man in his early 20s weighed just 75 pounds and was so sick with typhoid that DP camp doctors proclaimed him near death.
“There are those who say the Holocaust never happened,” said Heider, who now lives in Butler Twp. ”“If I don’t tell my story, who will believe us?”
Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death,” determined Heider’s fate upon his arrival at Auschwitz.
“That same day, we went through a selection, waiting for him to decide whether we would live or be put in the gas chambers,” he relates. “I kept pinching my cheeks to make myself look healthy. He finally came to my row and looked at me with his sadistic smiling face, right in my eyes. Mengele motioned me to the right. Had he motioned me to the left, I wouldn’t be here today.”
The twins standing next to him in line were taken away for medical experimentation. One million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz.
“We knew if we went to a concentration camp, there would be no chance for survival,” said Heider. “In camp, we didn’t have a name, we only had a number. I was number 124450.”
Dachau, he said, was the worst.
“We got one slice of bread every 24 hours, one pound of bread for every eight people,” he recalled.”You didn’t know whether to eat it all at once or save some of it for the next day, which meant it might be stolen. In order to get soup at Dachau, I had to climb over piles of dead bodies. When I finally got the soup, I didn’t know whether the bad smell was from the soup or the dead bodies. The images of piles of dead bodies will remain with me for the rest of my life.”
But the greatest hardship, he said, was knowing he would never see his family again. To maintain his sanity, Heider made up new words to the melodies his mother had sung him as a child. His most prized possession was a photograph of his sister that he kept hidden in his armpit when the selections for the gas chambers took place.
“If they had made us raise our arms, the picture would have dropped out,” he said.
His horrifying experiences included a middle-of-the-night surgery performed on him without anesthetic — “They taped my mouth so I wouldn’t cry out,” he said — and the lice and blood that covered his body. Prisoners went three months at a time without a shower.
But in the midst of the horror, there was also kindness. When Heider escaped from the Polish ghetto to a Christian family’s nearby farm in 1941, the woman of the house gave him a Polish name and hid him for a year. “He is my son,” she told the Gestapo when it was eventually discovered that Heider was Jewish. When the soldier raised his gun to shoot, she positioned herself in front of him to save him.
New beginnings
It was in the Bergen-Belsen DP camp after the liberation that Heider met his wife, Phyllis. The two traveled together to Landsberg, where they married, had a son and lived until 1949 when they were sent to the United States. They had two more children.
“Passover celebrates the liberation from slavery to freedom” Heider said about the just-completed Jewish festival. “Our ancestors were liberated through the exodus from Egypt; we were liberated from Nazi Germany to freedom in the United States where we can celebrate Passover in a free way. And I believe that as long as the gates to Israel are open, the doors to the crematorium will be closed forever.”
In Dayton, Heider first worked for the Metropolitan clothing store and then spent the rest of his career in the scrap business.
For many years, Heider was unable to share his Holocaust story with his three children.
“They couldn’t understand why they didn’t have grandparents like other children,” he recalls. “It was too painful to tell them. It took a long time.”
In recent years, however, Heider has told his story often — at community gatherings, at high school and colleges, and most recently to Wright State University’s medical students for their “Medical Ethics and the Holocaust” elective. He cries every time he relates his experiences, particularly when he talks about the family he lost.”
“Why did the world keep silent? The United States and the world knew what was going on,” he said. “They knew that Hitler was killing Jews by the millions, but no one intervened.”
This afternoon, before Heider chants his memorial prayer in Hebrew, he will talk about the 70th anniversary of his liberation. On April 23, 1945, he was pushed into a train cattle car along with 59 others. There was no food, no water and no sanitation. Many died on the train.
“After traveling for five days with the unbearable smell of human waste, we finally stopped in a place called Staltach,” he said. “We were ordered out of the train and told not to move. After a while we saw a lot of tanks on the nearby highway, and a few turned on our direction. The closer they came, one of us started yelling in Yiddish: ‘Americani, Americani.’ It was the most beautiful sound I ever heard. One solider came from behind one of the tanks and as he approached us, he said in broken German: ‘Don’t be afraid. You are free.’ ”
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