Serving Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, and other towns of the North Carolina High Country
Founded 05-05-05
July 3, 2008 issue
Holocaust Survivor Recalls Dark Past
Story by Katrina Benton
On Wednesday, June 25, David Mermelstein, a concentration camp survivor, shared his story with teachers, students and community members at the Broyhill Inn and Conference Center as a part of the weeklong Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies’ Holocaust Symposium at Appalachian State University.
Mermelstein lived in the Carpatian Mountains in Czechoslovakia with his four brothers, younger sister, grandmother, aunt and parents when the Germans invaded the country in 1939.
In 1942, the German soldiers walked in with an official document in hand, brandishing it in front of David’s father. As of that day, the Mermelsteins no longer had a business at home, or a means of an income. The Germans took their business and every piece of silver they could find, including the family’s cherished candelabras and dinnerware. For David, education ended at age 13. Work became not only practical but also obligatory.
To compensate for their loss, David’s older brothers tailored while the rest of the family concentrated on home duties. David learned to weave baskets for money to buy food. While they were working, he and one of his brothers had to clearly display the Star of David on their clothes, so everyone knew they were Jews.
In 1944, the Germans moved the Jews from homes to the ghetto in Beregszasz where the first killings happened. [The Germans] would line [the Jews] up and shoot them in the head,” David said. Trains were also arriving daily to disperse Jews to concentration camps.
Around the Passover holiday in 1944, the Germans surrounded David’s hometown and gave all the Jews two hours to pack their belongings. David recalls finding a large pair of pants and stuffing them with underwear, a shirt and a jacket. He had no way to carry any more items. The Germans packed David and about 100 other Jews into several train carts. Each cart had two buckets: the one on the right for water, the one on the left for facilities. After two days and a night, David and his 99 new companions reached their destination, Auschwitz.
The Germans instructed them that they would work for farms and factories. The Gestapo held big sticks and ordered dogs to help herd the Jews out of the carts, telling them they had to leave their beloved belongings from home on the train. The people embarking from the train formed lines, with women and children to the left and men to the right.
The 14-year-old David stepped on his brother’s shoes to look taller and pinched his cheeks to look healthier, as advised by a Jewish trustee, and was led to a building where his head was shaved, clothes were stripped from his body and he was hosed with cold water. David received a striped cap, shirt and pants.
On his route to the barracks, German soldiers shouted, “[You] came here to die!” “Just wait your turn!” and “If you get out of line, I’ll shoot you and we don’t have to tell anybody!”
Many young Jews, like David, asked the Jewish trustee at night, “When can we see our parents?” The man didn’t say a word. He instructed the youth to follow him to the door. “See the chimneys?” the trustee said. “No brothers, no sisters, no parents—don’t ask again.”
Every night the smell and smoke of cremated bodies filled the air.
Auschwitz was not a typical death camp; it was a selection camp. Inhumane experiments, such as attempting to change eye color by chemical injection or placing subjects in pressure chambers, were among the atrocities that occurred.
The Nazis would line up Jews on the outside of a building and shoot them one by one in the forehead; this practice became known as the “shooting wall.” Jews were also sent to the gas chambers or lived in the worst conditions until death or camp reassignment.
At 5:30 every morning, following roll call, breakfast was served. “Every morning and every night, [the Germans] counted,” David said. “Supper was a slice of bread, blackish-green goop and a half of a cup of coffee.”
At random, the Nazis ordered a death march to a satellite camp. Todesmarsche, or death march, served as a mode of transporting Jews to other camps as well as a killing device. Thousands of Jews died marching hundreds of miles in the dead of winter.
After surviving a death march, David remembers arriving at the camp and seeing stacks of bodies piled high outside the crematoriums because the guards and ovens weren’t working fast enough.
The Jews lived in a building consisting of three rooms. Arbitrarily, the Jews were moved from room one to room two to room three. After the third room, the Nazis threw the Jews out to sleep on the cold ground outside. By day three, David was a living, breathing skeleton.
But the gates opened one night and tanks dressed in red, white and blue flags came charging into the camp. A soldier picked David up, but he immediately collapsed. The man rushed him to a makeshift hospital. Three weeks passed before David could walk again.
After regaining some of his health, the U.S. soldiers sent David to a Czechoslovakian school where another group of Americans offered shelter, bread, jelly and coffee. This seemingly inadequate diet was all the survivors’ stomachs could handle.
“The line outside the school was never-ending,” David said. “It went down the road and around the corner.” He recalls the American soldiers telling them to “not eat too much, there will be more tomorrow.”
At a soup kitchen in his cousin’s hometown, David met a pretty server, who a few years later became Mrs. Irene Mermelstein. “She didn’t want to look at me, but I looked at her,” David said. And on March 14, 1947, David Mermelstein left on the Liberty Ship from Europe and sailed to Providence, Rhode Island.
David and Irene married December 2, 1950, in New Jersey. Two weeks later, they moved to Miami Beach, Florida, where they started a successful dry cleaning business and reared two daughters and a son. David and Irene found other survivors in Miami and created a social organization, the New American Jewish Social Club, specifically for Jews who lived through the Holocaust horror.
Today, David travels to schools and communities all over the United States to give his testimony and hopes that the issues that escalated and formed the Holocaust, prejudice and hatred, will stop occurring.
His children and grandchildren are all college graduates and live comfortable and happy lifestyles.
Irene believes that she and her husband are lucky. “We smile because we are happy to be alive,” Irene said. Irene wishes, for future generations, the image of the Holocaust will live on as “[an event] not about hate, but love.”