When I sat down with Emil Hecht in Jerusalem

This interview with Emil Hecht was conducted in Jerusalem iin 1981, at the time of the first world gathering of Jewish Holocaust survivors. It was originally printed in the July 3, 1981 IJN. At the time Hillel Goldberg was the IJN Israel correspondent and senior editor.

JERUSALEM — Behind Emil Hecht’s successful business career in Denver lies a complex tapestry of suffering, of reflection and of heroism.

Now a partner with Larry Mizel in Denver’s largest home-building corporation, 37 years ago Hecht was in Auschwitz. A year later he was one of the “four horses” smuggling Jews out of Eastern Europe. Two years before that he was mastering advanced mathematics, Shakespeare, Bialik and eight languages.

And two weeks ago Hecht was in Israel retelling how and why all but one of his siblings survived the Holocaust, this at a time when 99 out of 100 were killed.

 

Emil Hecht — back in Czechoslovakian Zionist party days it was Zvi Hecht, and back in his home it was Herschel Hecht — has stayed away from the books and novels and trials about the Holocaust.

 

Someday he might put it all down in words and he doesn’t want to be influenced by the debates and the discussions that came afterward. He doesn’t want to dilute his experience. He saw it. Lived it. He has thought about it; why it happened, how it happened. And he doesn’t want his direct experience to be filtered through anyone’s mind but his own.

An incredible mind it is. At the high school which he so fondly remembers, of which 400 students met in Israel two weeks ago in reunion, Emil Hecht underwent a “rigid, scholastic education.”

It was filled with extensive study of English as a second language (as a teenager he already knew Yiddish, Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, Hebrew and Aramaic), with extensive study of physics and higher mathematics, with memorization of long tracts of Shakespeare, Browning, Poe, Bialik, and other Hebrew and English poets, and with active political training — both in Zionist affairs and in the sad quarrels which rent the Jewish community of pre-war Munkacz and the surrounding Hungarian and Czechoslovakian Jewish populations.

But a mind is not everything. Neither is comfort nor success.

“We never had a youth,” says Hecht. “We’re the lost generation, the dor ha-midbar. We came out of the camps weak and feeble. Then we had to struggle to establish ourselves economically. And now we’re old. Even if we made it economically, we can’t enjoy it any more.”

There is no bitterness. The voice is so full of energy and enthusiasm that regret is the last word to characterize it.

THE voice is that of realism, of facing facts and adjusting to them as quickly as possible. It is to this habit of mind that Hecht attributes his survival — and that of all of his brothers.

“Every one of them was taken away in 1940 to the Hungarian slave labor force. Every one of them, independent of the other, ran away at the first opportunity. Some to the Czech army. Some to the forests. Some arrested and sentenced to death along the way.”

There was luck, too.

“I was not taken until 1944. I was the first Jew who came to Mauthausen who was not put to death. I was the first out of the wagon.” The wagon had brought him from Auschwitz.

“I was put to work building underground factories for the Germans. They hid their factories in the mountains. This was 1944. The Germans were being bombed. Unfortunately, I was making airplanes for them underground.” Refusal to make the planes meant swift death. That was reality in Mauthausen.

“I was 70 pounds when I got out,” says Hecht.

“It was my Jewish learning that kept me going. Today the young people do not know the last 300 years of Jewish history. I did.

“The high school — the ‘gymnasium’ — in Munkacz taught us. I knew that we had had holocausts before — the tach ve-tat massacres, for example — young people today have never heard of them, of the Cossacks and Chemielcki — but I had studied all this. I knew that there were lesser holocausts before and that we always survived.”

What about the specifics? The selections, the tortures, the starvation, the kapos at Auschwitz, at Mauthausen, at the other camps — how did Hecht survive them? On this he is reticent. He does not volunteer and I do not ask. Each survivor will talk when he is ready. Maybe he will never be ready, and that, too, is his privilege.

When Hecht got out he enrolled in medical school in Prague. One day in 1946 he heard that the Russians would arrive soon. They would examine his papers and would see that he had studied in a Hebrew gymnasium, would learn his family was strongly Zionist and officially identified as such in pre-1944 Czechoslovakia. They would, in short, ship Hecht to Siberia.

“24 hours later I was in a DP camp in Germany,” says Hecht, matter of factly. Again reality and adjustment.

It was in the Displaced Persons camp that Hecht’s good knowledge of English served him well. He could communicate with the Americans and the British and he knew all the languages of the survivors. He worked under the aegis of the Joint Distribution Committee.

It was illegal for most of the survivors to enter the DP camps then. It was Hecht and three others— the “four horses” — who did it, along with many others of the B’richa, the “flight” which spontaneously arose right after the war.

The job was first to get the Jews out of Eastern Europe — where the gentile population continued to murder them even after the war was over — and into the custody of families, preferably the Americans.

Second, the job was to get them out of the occupied German zones into Palestine. Hecht himself was scheduled to go to Palestine, where most of his siblings settled, but in 1948 the War of Liberation broke out and Hecht was ill. Under the circumstances the Jewish Agency suggested he settle elsewhere.

“Once we were bringing a trainload of survivors to Germany,” said Hecht. “I was sent ahead and found out that the destination was a former POW camp. It had barbed wire all around it.

“I called Munich at once and told them that they were going to have trouble. Sure enough, the train came and the survivors refused to disembark. They simply were not going to another barbed wire compound. I tried to tell them that it was harmless. But they wouldn’t move.

“Finally, after two days, an American colonel came in. It was Col. Keese. I remember his name. I explained to him that these were normal people, but that for perfectly understandable psychological reasons they were afraid of barbed wire. He gave the order: In three hours the barbed wire was gone.

Time magazine wrote it up this way: We are trying to help these refugees, but they are not obeying, not cooperating.

“I say that Truman was an ohev  Israel, a friend of the Jews. He relieved the pressure when he realized this ‘flight.’ I don’t know why he did it, but he did it. It was the UN’s job to take down this barbed wire, but the UN had so much influence that it stopped it. American soldiers did it.”

HECHT is now deep into reminiscence. We had started talking casually in his sister’s fabric shop in downtown Jerusalem. There were two small makeshift tables. We were sitting on them. By now it was as if nothing else existed but him, me, and his memories.

Quietly but with verve, Hecht began to sing the old shir ha-b’richa, “Song of the Flight.” I ask him to write it down. He does, in clear Hebrew: “On the borders, on paths where there is no path/During nights darkened with stars/Caravans of brothers without stop/To the homeland we accompany them . . . ”

Who were the other three “horses,” Hecht’s companions?

“There was Hayyim Sternbach,” answers Hecht. “He is now on Long  Island.

Then there were Dudi Kapolovich and Naftali Schoenfeld. “I don’t know where they are now.”

I almost suggest that he proceed to the computer terminals at the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. Perhaps his companions are here, right now, in Jerusalem. Perhaps he can locate them, as others located friends and relatives after 40 years. But I don’t suggest it.

Hecht has already told me that he had stayed away from the World Gathering because it would have been “too much emotion.” He had just come from a three day reunion with 400 friends at the old Hebrew Gymnasium of Munkacz. They had come from Los Angeles, Melbourne, South America, Israel, New York — all over the world.

“I saw friends whom I knew when they were 18 and 20. And now they are old. That’s a great shock.”

WHAT does it all mean?

“We Jews have a unique destiny, whether we like it or not. I survived by facing facts, and not by dreams, and by adjusting immediately. We have no choice but to adjust to fact.

“We can’t live by the philosophy of my Orthodox brethren back in Hungary, who had one response to the Holocaust: It is a gezeira min ha-shamayim, a decree from Heaven, to which we can only submit.

“But it was not only the Orthodox who were not prepared. It was even my part of society, the intelligentsia, the modern, the forward looking. We, the progressive, were not prepared.

“The time has come, before we die out, to talk and think about the deep-seated beliefs that have aided in our utter destruction.

“I do not want to overdo it, to make the Jewish people miserable. I am not predicting another Holocaust. But we are a unique people and cannot ignore history. The least we can do is to arm our generation with knowledge. I’m not saying that history will repeat itself, but it could.

“The mistake of the ‘decree from  Heaven’ approach led the Orthodox to their deaths. The mistake of a young man like me was in staying with my parents, watching over them, accompanying them to Auschwitz, instead of running away.

“But I didn’t know. We just did not know. They say that they knew in Budapest, but did not tell us. I’m not accusing them — those in Budapest — saying that they sold us out. The truth is that we were not prepared, not sufficiently trained to act, to face reality.

“I will say this. When the religious people got into the camps, they had a better chance of survival because of their faith.

“If one were assimilated, he had no chance. He saw no end.

“Once in a while we would get meat — some salami — but the Orthodox actually refused to eat it because it was not kosher. Those people survived.
“I survived because of my faith: knowledge that there were holocausts before and that we had always survived them.

“The Holocaust was such a unique, deep, terrible experience that it can be understood only by people who were there.”

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