12/26/2023 0 Comments Death road to canada prime ministerMy father and I survived, but our world as we once knew it was lost. We lost our large and loving family including my mother and my sister. But survival was not a joyous occasion as one may think – it was an empty victory. Miraculously I survived many life-threatening and horrible events including typhus fever. I suffered through seven concentration camps, one death march and two death trains. It has been 73 years since my first trip there. They robbed me of my identity and my name I became just a number to be eliminated at their whim. I was no longer a person in the eyes of my persecutors they regarded and treated me as subhuman. In 1943 my chances of survival were virtually nil. I told him, “my father snapped me from the jaws of death by his courageous intervention at the last moment at the risk of his own life.” Trudeau asked me how I managed to survive. In 1943 I was shipped to Auschwitz-Birkenau destined to my death in a gas chamber. In 1942 at the Wannsee Conference, they condemned me to death for being born a Jew. In 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland and did the same to the Polish Jews, including me. In 1935 Nazi Germany declared all German Jews as Untermentchen (less than human), removed their citizenship and abrogated their human rights. a country where I established a new life, were I obtained an education and achieved a successful career, where my wife and I were blessed with a beautiful family of three daughters, three special sons-in-law and nine terrific and gifted grandchildren. However this was different: not only would I be there with my wife Bernice, my daughter Arla and my granddaughter Jennifer, but I would be there with the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of our beloved and wonderful Canada…. I visited the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau over 30 times on the March of the Living, and on many other occasions. Over the last 26 years I visited Poland, a free and democratic country, many times. I was excited to go – this was a unique opportunity and privilege not afforded to many survivors of the Shoah. It all started three days earlier when Eli Rubenstein, the Canadian director of the March of the Living, asked me if I would consider accompanying the Prime Minister to Poland. On July 10, 2016, I walked with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau through the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau where, at age 15, I confronted death for the first but not for the last time.
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