Holocaust survivor, part 1

Only a few people know what it’s like to lose your freedom, your identity and have family members executed. 

Their crime punishable by death? Being Jewish.

For some time now I’ve been meaning to do a story about Max Steinmetz, a Holocaust survivor. I recently spent 3 hours in the new Holocaust museum in Washington.  I came away determined to finally do that story about Mr. Steinmetz… I’ve decided now to do two. 

Max Steinmetz’s cry to us all today is never again… we can’t let it ever happen again.  The last time Max Steinmetz saw his mother and father and sister Esther was when they were taken to a German prison camp.  Max and his brother Henry were sent to the right… his father Lewis, mother Ilona and sister Esther were sent to the left… to the left meant to the gas chambers…to the ovens.  His younger brother Henry died in camp… starved to death.

“I was with him until the day before he died, because I had to go to work that morning out of the camp…by the time I came back in the evening he was already dead,“ Max said.

Max Steinmetz has no idea where or if his family members were buried or incinerated. It’s just one of so many questions he struggles with.

“I honestly do not know why I survived. I tried to find reasons, but we lived from day to day,” Max said. “I hope to live til tomorrow and it really didn’t matter if I lived until tomorrow.”

Max Steinmetz was 18 years old; no one could fathom that someone would want to exterminate an entire race of people.  Was it pure hatred….pure evil… or was it political opportunity and power?

“Hitler used this to promote himself,” Max said. “It helped him to become what he became, the chancellor of Germany and the more he preached hatred against Jews and others, the more famous he became.“

Max Steinmetz still dreams of slave labor…of sickness and the stench of death.

“I still live with it, it’s still in my memory, it’s still in front of me, so therefore it seems like it just happened a couple of weeks ago instead of 60 some years ago,“ Max said.

Max and his lovely wife Betty have been married more than 50 years. They have a son who is a local doctor and two daughters.  Their retirement years are good… they are loved and love back. 

Max Steinmetz was never given a tattoo to mark him as a Jew. His number 72041 was on a patch on his clothing along with a Star of David that identified who he was to his captors.

“The minute we were taken to Auschwitz we lost our identity…we didn’t have names any more…they told us we no longer had a name just a number,“ Max said. “We just took one day at a time. Life was meaningless, life had no meaning at all, it had no purpose… we felt God had abandoned us.“

I took my 13-year-old son Jack with me to meet Max Steinmetz.  I wanted him to meet him, to know his story, to maybe someday report himself about the people who survived.

“When I was his age, we said the same thing… It can’t happen here, it can happen there but not here… but we were wrong, it did happen,” Max said.

Tomorrow, our second story about Max Steinmetz: how the Americans came; how he came to America with nothing… and the lesson he wants my sons and your children to never, ever forget.