Zoltan Blau

Zoltan Blau (M / Hungary, 1930), Holocaust survivor.

• KEYWORDS : <Auschwitz> <Buchenwald> <Block 8> <Liberation of Buchenwald>

Biography

Zoltan Blau was born in 1930 at Tarpa, Hungary. Deported to Auschwitz, then to Jawischowitz. He ended in Buchelwald (Block 8), until Liberation.

He was interviewed on 5/24/1995 (USC Shoah Foundation Institute).

Chicago Tribune (16 April 1995), by Robert Blau

RETURN TO BUCHENWALD IS TRIUMPH OF THE SPIRIT

My father didn't know from double-headers.

He was perplexed by basketball, didn't understand the appeal of the Good Humor Man and couldn't pronounce any word that began with the letter "w." A compact immigrant named Zoltan, he asked "Vhy?" like Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Which is what I thought he would say when I asked if he wanted to return to Buchenwald a half-century after he had been liberated from the German concentration camp as a 14-year-old Jewish orphan.

With uncharacteristic enthusiasm, he said, "Vhy not?"

When plans were finalized, my brother, my wife and I agreed to join him. We gathered in Frankfurt April 7, and with some apprehension, boarded the 10:50 a.m. train for Weimar.

"It's a swooshing sound, not the click-click-click of yesterday," my father observed as the train sped smoothly east through the flat, green landscape. Heavy industry gave way to agriculture as thick trees gradually outnumbered smokestacks and electrical towers. Soon dense forest surrounded us, stirring a nauseating wave of discomfort in my father as he recognized the scenery.

It was through these forests that he traveled once before, on his way to Buchenwald from the extermination camp at Auschwitz in Poland. That train had no roof. It took roughly a week to make the trip. For the hundreds of children packed tightly against each other, the only food was snow.

Now we ate cheese sandwiches and sipped strong coffee in the cafe car, charting our progress on colorful maps and wondering what the rooms would be like at the Weimar Hilton. Until 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, the deceptively quaint and cultured city of Weimar had belonged to East Germany, with few amenities plusher than a hard boiled egg. The tourists have since returned to visit the homes of Goethe and Schiller, the glitter twins of German high culture, and to pose in front of their statues.

We had come to visit the dark side of Weimar, a stark place a few miles outside town, where suffering was administered in equal parts to the body and mind. Unlike the death mills at Auschwitz, where the systematic gassing of prisoners took place around the clock, here most prisoners were forced to work for the German war machine, and torture was practiced with simpler instruments-the whip, the syringe, the rope, the revolver. More than 55,000 died at Buchenwald.

When the camp was liberated by American troops on April 11, 1945, 21,000 prisoners were found alive. That included 900 children, my father among them.

We had returned to introduce ourselves to Nazi ghosts, to walk through the barracks they had built, laugh loudly, string roses along the barbed wire, and in the musty air of the crematorium, light memorial candles. We had come to Buchenwald, the children of survivors, as symbols of the triumph over genocide.

My father, I know, wouldn't have, couldn't have, gone without us. The first night in Weimar he told a German schoolteacher, "With my kids I can cope with the bad memories."

Of all the Holocaust survivors I grew up around-including one set of grandparents and my mother, who spent the war posing as a Catholic schoolgirl-my father was the most capable of calmly reconstructing his past. He had been old enough to remember and young enough to heal. Although we had heard many of the stories, we wanted to hear them again, from the beginning. And he wanted to tell them.

He was born in Tarpa, a small town in eastern Hungary, rich with walnuts, chickens and mud. There were seven children in his family.

When Hungary was occupied by Germany in 1944, its Jews were rounded up and shipped to concentration camps, primarily Auschwitz.

My father arrived there with his parents, two sisters-the other siblings were scattered throughout Eastern Europe-and thousands of exhausted and terrified Hungarian Jews.

Even then they didn't know what awaited them. My father recalled the orderly way the transport detail gathered their suitcases and clothes. One of these inmates, wearing a clean and pressed striped uniform, quietly suggested that my father leave his mother to join the adult males.

He said goodbye to her and to his sisters and attached himself to a cluster of young men. By then he had lost sight of his father.

Days later, an inmate confirmed his fears.

"You see that smoke," the inmate said, gesturing to the crematoria. "That smoke is your parents."

His youngest sister also perished.

Tattooed with the number A-3913 at the gates of Auschwitz, he was transported with a group of teenagers to a coal mine near the camp, where they remained for several months. The food smuggled to them by sympathetic Polish civilian workers sustained them.

More important, they were not required to attend the roll calls in the main camp, where the SS filled the daily quota for the gas chambers.

"That meant something," my father said as he cataloged the luck that kept him from the daily "selection."

When Soviet troops advanced on Poland at the end of 1944, thousands of prisoners were either gassed or transported from Auschwitz to the interior of Germany.

At Buchenwald, my father was placed in Block 8, a long wooden barracks teeming with more than 400 children from all over Europe.

They communicated mainly in Yiddish, Hungarian and German, and occasionally received a clandestine math lesson from one of the prisoners. Much of camp was controlled by inmates, many of whom could be as brutal as the Nazis. The leader of Block 8 was a German political prisoner, Wilhelm Hammann, a teacher who would ultimately save their lives.

As the Allied armies closed in on Buchenwald in the spring of 1945, the SS hastily prepared to kill the remaining prisoners and destroy evidence of atrocities.

During the first week of April, Hammann and a few of his assistants distributed triangular patches bearing the insignias of Ukrainian, Russian and French prisoners, and ordered the Jewish children to sew them on in place of their yellow stars of David.

The following morning SS guards surrounded Block 8.

"All Jews come forward," one of the guards demanded.

No one moved.

Hammann insisted there were no Jews in the barracks. A guard cocked a gun and pointed it toward him. Hammann repeated there were none.

Moments later, commotion erupted in another part of the camp. The guards took off, running. They never returned.

Although thousands of prisoners were sent on death marches in the final days of the camp, the children of Block 8 were left behind until April 11, when they were told their turn had come.

"All of a sudden the sirens started to blare, a horrible shrieking sound, and people were yelling back and forth from the barracks," my father recalled. "Then we saw some prisoners sneaking around with guns, taking up positions."

The guards were gone. The camp had been liberated.

My father and several friends raided the former SS barracks, foraging for food, food they had dreamt about and talked about in their darkest hours.

They ate with abandon from a box filled with what appeared to be hard, round cookies. Dog biscuits.

We told the cabdriver to take us to Buchenwald. He deposited us at the top of Mt. Ettersberg, elevation 1,600 feet, from where you can see the red roofs of Weimar in the valley below.

The clock above the main gate is permanently stopped at 3:15, the hour of liberation. Beyond it lies the vast flat field where the barracks once stood. Their imprints are marked with gravel and stones.

Hundreds of visitors roamed the area. It didn't take long to pick up strains of Hebrew and Hungarian, my father gravitating to them with excitement. The former prisoners, easily identified by their orange name tags, embraced. My father rolled back the sleeves of a tailored Italian jacket to reveal his faded blue-green tattoo.

A Hungarian from Budapest grabbed him around the shoulders and asked him when he was born.

"1930," my father told him.

"Me too," the Hungarian said, adding, "I was bar mitzvahed here."

They laughed heartily at the joke.

Then the Hungarian cradled my father's cheeks in his hands as they both stood on the verge of tears.

So it went, one reunion after the other, though my father didn't remember or recognize most of those he met.

There was the nuclear engineer from York, England, who had been in Block 22; the inventor from Switzerland who had survived a six-week death march from Auschwitz; the wiry 70-year-old Israeli, a physical education instructor for the Israeli Army who was liberated from Block 66; the French painter who was showing his canvasses in the former disinfection center.

There was Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the chief rabbi of Israel, himself a prisoner in Block 8, telling a spellbound audience in the Weimar theater that he had not come to forgive but to remember.

They were not there to mourn. They were there, in the words of several survivors, to "have a good laugh" on the same spot where they were once slaves. They were there to lunch in the former SS barracks, the observant Jews dining on kosher cold cuts and Israeli olives.

For my father, Buchenwald was a lesson in the harshest aspects of human nature, but it did not define him as a human being. He had nothing but respect for the young Germans he spoke with, especially those from the former Eastern Bloc, who were so curious about events that had long been suppressed.

He wrote a note to the students of a school recently named after Wilhelm Hammann: "Let the older generation have the courage to face history and pass it on to the young so the mistakes of the past won't be repeated here or elsewhere."