“My worst moment was when we were discovered in the Warsaw Ghetto when the uprising started [in April 1943], after hiding in a bunker for three weeks. I knew we were going to die, because we knew that all the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto would be taken to Treblinka and murdered.
We were driven into a train car, and my father, like an angel, pushed us to the small window surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, so that we could breathe a sigh of relief: they put a lot of people into the carriages. , so much so that some people will die of suffocation.
In the barracks [at the Majdanek camp in occupied Poland], we were asked to strip naked. My father told me that I should say that I am over six years old. I’m eleven years old and a head taller than my twin sister, but I look 16.
A man in a white coat pushed me into the shower, and I started to pray, because we knew in the slums that the shower was fake, the gas would come out and we would die. .
But instead the water came out and they gave us prison clothes, so I figured my dad must be alive too. I started looking for him but I couldn’t find him. The next day I found out that my mother, father and my sister were killed by the Nazis.
I almost turned into nothingness, I felt that my life had no meaning, that I had lost everything.
For the next ten years, I never thought about the Holocaust. My brain did something that kept me from thinking about anything. I didn’t think about my family. I lived in this moment.
But ten years later, I began to suffer a lot, for years. My wife, Dorothy, saved me when I was screaming at night. We’ve been married now since 1957, and we still love each other as much as before, and it’s thanks to her that I’m really alive and my kids are fine.
The Holocaust is right inside of you. You cannot run away from it. It’s part of you. And it will be with you until the day you die. And if you have a soul and that soul goes to heaven or wherever it goes, that soul will remember the Holocaust.
I have a torch, which I want to give to children and to the world.
My torch has more than one flame. It has many flames. And my torch has no racism, no religion, no homophobia, no xenophobia and above all, no hatred.
Hatred is vicious. Hatred is evil. Hatred creates revenge. Hatred is something that should disappear from the world. This is the fire. These are the torches with all the different flames, which I give to the world, which I give to you.
Please take those flames and make the world a better place. It is getting better, but very slowly. We are suffering at the moment and I want the suffering to stop. The only way to do that is if everyone comes together to make the world bright and spread goodwill. “
