When Jack Adler visited Auschwitz-Birkenau on Jan. 27, the 70th anniversary of the camps liberation in 1945 — and during his four previous four trips for the annual commemoration — he did not say a prayer.
This despite the fact that his two sisters were murdered during the Holocaust, that his brother and mother died in a Polish ghetto, that his father was killed at Dachau and that Adler himself spent more than a year of his youth in Nazi death and slave labor camps.
This despite the horrific memories he has carried for seven decades, many of which he recorded in his powerful 2012 memoir, Y: A Holocaust Narrative, one of which describes the last time he saw his youngest sister shortly after what was left of his family arrived at Auschwitz:
“Peska turned one last time. We locked eyes . . . her blonde hair fell over her face as she twisted to see me. Her beautiful, full eyes should never have been consumed by that much fear. She turned back when the woman behind her pushed, and then they all moved on to the gas chambers.”
Adler’s other sister died at Bergen-Belsen.
Despite such memories and such loss, Adler is not a man to pray, even on ground where the ashes of his loved ones repose.
“I believe G-d created man and men created evil,” Adler, now 86, told the Intermountain Jewish News in an interview last week, just days after returning from Poland.
“G-d has nothing to do with the way we behave,” he says with no trace of rancor or resentment.
“I have seen people being led to gallows, to torture chambers, praying Shema Yisroel. I didn’t see any miracles. And if there is a G-d who allowed this to happen I don’t want to have any part of it.”
And so, he says in his sunny Colorado house on an unusually warm winters day, no prayers left his lips at Auschwitz.
Instead, Adler chose to honor his loved ones — and all the others who perished there — by going to the site where the Auschwitz gas chamber once stood, and lovingly placing flowers on what might be the saddest piece of ground on earth.
IF HIS words make Adler sound like a grim or bitter man, rest assured, this is the wrong impression. He is outgoing, friendly and lively, not at all shy about bringing humor into whatever sort of conversation hes having.
Asked whether his home is located in the suburban enclave of Lone Tree, he replies in the affirmative.
But they have to change the name of the town, he adds, straight-faced.
Why?
Because they found another tree.
Humor, Adler says, has been a lifetime passion, even during the darkest of days.
“I have a very good sense of humor,” he says with a confident smile. “I even used humor when I was a youngster in the camp, to survive.”
But he quickly loses the smile and his face changes, as if a cloud has just obscured the sun.
“But it’s very difficult when you know that you’re walking on the soil that contains the ashes of one million innocent people who had been slaughtered there.”
Adler came very close to being one of those people.
Born in 1929 to a family of synagogue-goers, he says, his hometown of Pabiance, Poland was overrun by the German army in the first week of the war, in September, 1939. His family was first sent to a small ghetto nearby where his mother and brother perished — and then, in the spring of 1942, to the larger one in the city of Lodz.
The famine- and disease-stricken Lodz ghetto was liquidated — its occupants forcibly moved on to death or slave labor camps — in 1944.
Adler was 15 when he arrived at Auschwitz. He came face to face with Dr. Josef Mengele, although he had no idea who the Nazi was nor, obviously, the infernal place in history his name would eventually come to occupy.
“I didn’t know who he was,” Adler says, “or what he was doing.”
He mutters the words that came to be Mengele’s nickname, The Angel of Death, with a scoffing laugh that somehow reveals both mockery and contempt.
He recalls that he was placed within a group of youthful males, all of whom were motioned toward Birkenau, the Auschwitz sister camp where most of the exterminations were carried out. None of them had any idea of what awaited them.
But Adler was fortunate enough to be spotted by a man who was a friend of his father’s. Without asking permission, the man was able to smuggle him back into his own barracks at Auschwitz, where he was reunited with his father.
The next day, the Nazi guard noticed during his head count that the barracks had one occupant too many.
The one who doesn’t belong here step forward at once, the guard ordered, but Adler followed his father’s advice to stay quiet. Another young man was selected, apparently at random, and led away.
“Lucky for me, but not so lucky for another individual, the guard walked up and down the row of prisoners and just pulled out a young-looking face,” Adler says.
It would take Adler decades to find out what happened to the group of youths he left behind in Birkenau.
Thanks to the recollections of the late Vivien Spitz of Denver, who was a stenographer during the Nuremberg Trials after WW II — especially the Doctors Trials, which dealt with the experiments that Mengele and other Nazis conducted — Adler discovered the truth.
The young Jewish men were chosen to be subjects in an experiment conducted for the Luftwaffe, the German air force.
“They wanted to know how much pressure the human body can withstand, so each boy was placed in a pressure chamber,” Adler says. “Once inside, from what I was told, the pressure was turned up higher and higher until the eardrums burst and the eyeballs popped out.”
Adler looks his visitor in the eyes.
“None of them survived,” he says quietly. “That’s what I escaped.
“The margin of that escape,” he adds, “was beyond comprehension.”
AS RUSSIAN forces drew closer in the final year of the war, the Germans evacuated prisoners from Auschwitz, Adler and his father included. They spent time in another camp, Kaufering, before ending up at Dachau, where Adler’s father died.
At Dachau, it was the Americans who drew closer. Adler was on the infamous Dachau Death March when he was finally liberated by US troops on May 1, 1945.
When it was all over, Adler was the sole survivor of a family that once numbered six.
“I asked, why did I survive, not my brother, sisters, father, mother?
“On the Death March out of Dachau, you marched day and night, you slept in the woods, they trampled people, killed them on the side of the road. And if you were unable to continue the march the following day, even if they didnt take you to the slaughter site, they shot you. They wouldn’t leave you behind.”
He survived by another margin beyond comprehension, Adler says.
“One more day, I couldn’t have continued the march. I was freed just in time. So how can I explain that?”
He lets the question hang in the air for a moment before answering it.
“Accident, he says with finality. No miracles.”
Only 16 years old, he was brought to the US as a war orphan, cared for by a family in the largely Jewish suburb of Skokie, near Chicago.
“I had nightmares initially,” he says, “shortly after I was liberated, but I was very fortunate to be placed in a wonderful foster home. They showed me a lot of support and care, and this reignited my faith in humanity.”
That care helped Adler immensely as he went on with his life, serving his own stint in the US Army, marrying in 1953, raising two children, earning a college degree, pursuing a successful career as an accountant and Justice Department analyst, retiring and ultimately moving to Colorado in 1992.
His retirement, he says, finally gave him the opportunity to begin speaking and writing publicly about his Holocaust experiences, about which he had been mostly silent for decades. Since coming to Colorado he estimates that he has told his story and shared his reflections with a million and a half people, many of them students.
Invariably, Adler’s presentations include something about tolerance, which he believes is the only effective tonic against the kind of hatred that led to the Holocaust.
“No matter how we identify ourselves — by religion, by ethnicity, by color of our skin — all seven billion of us, whether we like it or not or believe it or not, belong to one race — the human race.”
RETURNING TO Auschwitz, not only last month but for the past five years, is never an easy experience, Adler says.
“Passing, yet again, beneath the archway at the Auschwitz entrance with its grim motto Arbeit macht Frei brought back nothing pleasant,” Adler says.
“It is very difficult to return every time,” he says, but adds that he feels compelled.
“I think we should honor those who perished there. Over a million innocent Jewish men, women and children were slaughtered in that place. When I go there, I go in the loving memory of my loved ones, and others as well.”
The community-sponsored March of the Living first invited Adler to accompany the students on the tour five years ago.
“They explained to me that the students are anxious to learn firsthand of those atrocities, and I felt that I owe it to those who perished there as well as to the students, the next generation, so they can tell the story to future generations.
“There are six million voices that were silenced and someone has to speak on their behalf. I feel that I do so, as one individual.”
This winter’s trip was special in a personal sense, Adler adds, and not just because the anniversary happened to be the round number of 70 years. It was because of those who accompanied him.
His son Eli Adler (a filmmaker whose documentary Surviving Skokie, about the widely-known American Nazi Party march in Skokie in the 1970s, will be released next month) and grandchildren Laura Adler, Matthew Adler and Cary Shapiro all went with him.
“It was very special because my son and grandchildren were with me,” Adler says with a smile. “Three generations.”
He pauses, sensing another opening for a homespun joke, this one with a distinctly gallows tone.
“If I could tell that to Hitler,” Adler says, “he would commit suicide all over again.”
ADLER ALLOWS a handful of quick questions before the interview ends, and fields them all.
How did he survive?
“Humor and hope,” he says.
“One thing the Nazis couldn’t take away from us was what was in our heads. Every night I went to sleep I said to myself that I had to go on being strong, to see my loved ones again. I didn’t know that I wouldn’t, but that thought kept me going. People who gave up hope, very few survived. You had to have something to keep you going.”
Does he experience déjà vu, or glimpse ghosts — literal or metaphorical — when he’s back in Poland?
“You realize that your mind plays little tricks,” he says, “noting that in his hometown he remembered the walk to the local ghetto as a long and laborious trudge.
“It was a five minute walk,” Adler says, shrugging his shoulders.
In Auschwitz itself, he adds, on his first trip back his memory was jogged when he saw the odd horizontal chimney running along the floor of the barracks. He had utterly forgotten it.
He also saw how the death camps restorers had placed crude bunks in the main barracks room.
That was inaccurate, according to Adler’s experience.
“We slept on concrete. We never had bunks.”
Does he hate Germans or Poles?
“I don’t believe in hate. Hatred to me is a waste of energy. I’d rather utilize my energy toward doing something positive with it. However, I believe those who commit atrocities against any human being should be brought to justice and dealt with accordingly.”
An SS colonel in one of the camps actually saved Adler’s life, he says, while he knew plenty of Jews I wouldn’t have any part of.
If life is so complex, he suggests, how can one view human beings in simplistic terms?
“Those who hated me and so many millions of others would want me to hate,” Adler says.
“In my opinion, mutual respect, guided by the Golden Rule — do unto others as you would have them do unto you — is the key to the survival of humanity. Until humanity as a whole embraces that and lives by it, we will continue to destroy each other.”
He is asked about the phrase never again — almost a mantra to Holocaust survivors — as a guiding principle.
“It’s a good saying,” Adler says, “but the world is far away from achieving a state where never again is real.”
He speaks of genocides in Rwanda, Somalia and Zaire, and of such animals masquerading as humans as ISIS, al-Qaida and the Taliban.
“Never again will happen when humanity as a whole stops evil and lives by the Golden Rule,” Adler says.
“Not until then.”
Chris Leppek may be reached at IJNEWS@aol.com. This story was updated on February 12, 2015.
Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News
