The Fires of Survival

The inspiring power of story shakes and inspires the very foundation of humanity. Often times we try to omit painful events from contemplation, in order to spare ourselves emotional pain. Tonight was a celebration of human triumph in the face paramount tribulation.

The Holocaust features horrors that exceeded human imagination. But yet we are deeply affected by the dark failures of mankind. Tonight I met ninety-six year old Mr. Elias Feinzilberg, a spanish speaking survivor of the Holocaust. his story inspired me to turn my attention more to family and to divine supplication.

Elias was the only member of his family to survive the "Shoah", or the Holocaust. He was twenty-two years old when his town was first touched by the German invasion in Poland. He recalled that in those first weeks his father was carried out into the streets by German soldiers and shaved with a knife. He remembered his father stumbling back into his house, blood pouring from his face onto his blouse, and the screams emanating from outside. "Even in my early adulthood, I felt scared like a child", he said. Being a strong man, and seeing his family struggle to survive, he went out in search of work, despite extreme risk. It would be the last time he ever saw them.

He went from town to town doing anything from chopping wood, to working in coal mines. He recalls that once he was complimented on his strength by the SS and given a wonderful stew in return for his good work. After traveling abroad for a time, he returned home to find an empty home. Later he would find out from a camp survivor that ran away, that his father died of starvation, and his five sisters, two brothers, and mother were taken to their death in a concentration camp, were they were gassed, and burned. Overcome with grief he left home once again, but this time he was captured by German forces and taken to Dachau, when his head was shaved and he was stripped of all clothing he remembers thinking that this was going to be the place of his death. He remembered mountains of bodies, which he described as "volcanoes", because of the smoke and fire which consumed them.

One morning he was awoken and ordered to meet with a regiment of SS troops, were unknowingly he would be taken on a death march where all the company but him would die. "To this day I don't know how I came out of those fourteen days alive. We were deprived of food and water for the entire experience, and by all means should have succumbed to death." He remembered calling upon god to deliver him; he undeniably was.

In the final days of the war he was taken by two soldiers to the banks of a river, where they tried to put him in a potato sack, throw him in the rushing stream, and shoot him. "This was the moment when surely I was going to die." He closed his eyes in preparation, when he heard from behind, two gun shots. Unknowingly at the very moment of his execution, the Americans came to his rescue. They untied him, and in tears he embraced his heroes. In the following days, thousands of prisoners would die from overeating. He recalled the enormous bodily pain that came from it. He would later marry one of the women who gave him food to eat.

Mr. Feinzilberg, moved to Guatemala for twenty-two years with his wife and children. He currently lives in Jerusalem, and has reached the ripe old age of ninety-six years old, and hopes to continue on in his healthy, and happy life.

When asked what kept him going through the experience he said, "family, mine was taken from me, and the greatest desire of my heart was to have one of my own. That is what kept me going."