Holocaust survivor recounts harrowing tale of loss, rebirth

It was fate, Holocaust survivor Irene Zisblatt said, that allowed her to make it through Auschwitz and retell her story to an audience of people young enough to be her grandchildren. Zisblatt, featured in Steven Spielberg's Academy Award-winning documentary The Last Days, spoke Sunday evening in Meyerson Hall to a crowd of about 30 students. The event was sponsored by the Hillel Holocaust Education Committee. She began the event by explaining that her primary goal was to pass on a story that has haunted her for more than 50 years. "My mission is to share my experience with you? to heal the sickness of hatred," Zisblatt said. Zisblatt, an Orthodox Jew, was 13 years old when she was deported from her home in Hungary to Auschwitz in late 1944. She was among the almost 440,000 Jews sent to the notorious concentration camp in the final days of the war. Both of Zisblatt's parents and her siblings were killed in a gas chamber. But Zisblatt was saved from the same fate because she could not fit in the chamber and was instead thrown into a train leaving Auschwitz to go to a labor camp. During her speech, Zisblatt pulled out four small diamonds, which, she explained, had been given to her by her mother before her death. The diamonds, Zisblatt continued, became a symbol of her mother and gave her the strength to survive. Every day, she swallowed the diamonds to hide them from Nazi guards, and every day she painfully retrieved them. Holding back tears, Zisblatt described the horrid conditions of the camp, the drugged soup, the swollen stomachs of the inmates, the humiliation, the loss of hope and most of all, the dehumanization of the victims. She said she still cannot understand how she was among the lucky ones who survived. "I still hear [the children] cry out from the ashes," she said. "For me there is no medicine I can take to heal the pain." Zisblatt was eventually rescued by American troops at the end of the war and was later sent to a displaced person's camp in Salzburg, Austria. While there, an article written by an American soldier who had liberated Auschwitz appeared in a Jewish newspaper in New York -- causing fate to once again determine the course of Zisblatt's life. An uncle living in the Bronx read the article and adopted Zisblatt, who said she would otherwise have gone to an orphanage. In her speech, Zisblatt heaped credit upon Steven Spielberg for starting the Shoah Survivor's Foundation in 1994, after filming Schindler's List. The foundation documents the testimonies of hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors in an effort to create a comprehensive visual history to educate future generations. She also said the Academy Award-winning film gave her the courage to speak out about her experiences, which she had been silent about for more than a half-century. Zisblatt revisited Auschwitz in 1996 in the March of the Living, along with 5,000 other Holocaust survivors. "When I visited the camp," she said, "I lit my candle and sat down on the ground and prayed for the victims." Throughout the evening, Zisblatt emphasized her purpose in speaking about her experiences, explaining that she wants to educate future generations about tolerance and humanity. Zisblatt said that the United States has a moral obligation to save people from genocide and to never turn its back on those threatened. "What happened to us should never happen again," she said.

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