Guest Writer Alan Schlesinger
The Story of How My Father Survived the Holocaust
Now that I am retired, I have finally had the opportunity to write my father’s memoir more than thirty years after his death and almost fifty years since he told me about his experience during the Holocaust. I have titled the book Resilience: The Story of How My Father Survived the Holocaust.
My father, Joseph Schlesinger, had a remarkable life. Born in Hungary in 1910, he survived two world wars and the Nazi Holocaust, emigrated to the United States, and started a family. While anyone’s survival of the Holocaust is a miracle, my father’s story is in many ways even more incredible. He survived the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Still, before that, he endured seventeen months of forced labor during the Russian invasion by the Axis armies and the Soviet offensive that eventually expelled the invaders. Few forced laborers survived the atrocities at the eastern front and the brutally cold Russian winter. Yet my father endured returning to Hungary just before the mass deportation of the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.
After six months in Auschwitz, where his parents were victims of the Nazi extermination plan of the “final solution,” he was eventually transferred to Nordhausen concentration camp, where he worked as a slave laborer building underground tunnels to produce the V-2 rockets.
After escaping during a British bombing raid, he began his harrowing escape from the Nazis and the advancing Russian Army to reach the American occupation zone at the war’s end.
Alone (an only child) and weighing under 100 pounds, he began rebuilding his life. He was placed in a displaced person camp in Eschwege, Germany ( “Displaced person” or “DP” was used by the American government for the refugees after World War II). As a physician, he started a medical practice in the self-governed DP camp, caring for the other DPs.
While beginning to heal physically, he realized that to survive emotionally. He had to let go of his anger, be grateful for his blessings, and build a new life with hope for the future.
The book has many examples of my father’s choices to live a grateful life, rather than harbor resentment. Perhaps the most moving was the following story told to me by my mother (they met in the DP camp) after my father’s death. Once my father established his medical practice for the other DPs, it was decided by the American occupation government that the US Army doctor would care for all of the US Army personnel at the Army base in town. The local German civilian doctors would care for the German civilians in the city, and my father would care for the DPs in the camp.
A problem arose when the local physicians in town did not want to treat those civilians who were former Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, or suspected Nazi sympathizers. They asked the Army doctor if he would treat them, but he was not allowed to do so by the Army. My father volunteered to care for these people, stating that they would have defeated him if the Nazis could take away his humanity and make him break his Hippocratic oath. He had decided that to move forward and fully heal, he had not to seek vengeance, but instead try to forgive.
Among the many stories of survivors from the horrors of the Holocaust, I believe my father is unique. Beyond his physical survival, his emotional survival and ability to start a new life celebrating life with optimism and joy represent an amazing triumph of gratitude and forgiveness over anger and resentment.
This photograph, taken on our boat in New Hampshire in 1968, reveals his complete physical and emotional survival. He had been swimming in Lake Winnipesaukee and climbing the ladder to return to the boat. Someone said something funny, and my father laughed so wildly that he was falling toward his right and almost out of the photograph’s frame. He is filled with joy. Despite the number tattooed on his arm clearly visible, and the loss and pain it symbolized, his joy cannot be contained. He has healed—healed completely—and will enjoy every moment of the rest of his life.
