Holocaust survivor shares Hitler’s horrors

“Although she’s not a big person,” said Lincoln Middle School yearbook coordinator Fred Biggs as he introduced Gussie Zaks to the crowd, “this room isn’t big enough to hold the importance of her words.”

More than 500 students crammed into the school cafeteria Wednesday to hear a firsthand report on the horrors of World War II’s Holocaust and attempts by radicals to rewrite that history.

Zaks led them with grit and determination through the torture and starvation in Nazi work camps and death camps.

“I was 14 when they picked me up and sent me away to five years in Nazi camps,” said the 72-year-old native of Poland. “I never saw my family again.”

Zaks displayed for the students a fake $100 bill with the phone numbers of a White Power organization whose propaganda says the Holocaust never happened.

It most definitely happened, Zaks assured the audience, which had grown silent.

“If they didn’t send you to a working camp, you went to a death camp,” she said. “They lined up 1,000 girls. Who’s going to be the lucky ones? Who’ll get to go to a work camp? Everyone was taller than me – stronger-looking. I started to cry. Two girls picked me up so I would look taller. After two hours of the Germans looking at us, I was sent to a work camp.”

They worked her ragged in the fields in subzero weather, often from 7 in the morning until 10 at night. It didn’t get better, and it didn’t get worse. Only the seasons changed.

“In 1944, we didn’t know that Germany (was losing) the war. They lined us up and took us on a death march. We ate snow for three days. We went 20 to 40 miles a day. There was no cook. We slept at farms with the mice and rats all over us.”

Some of the gutsiest among her group pretended to be German children and begged for food at local farmhouses.

“You never worried what you were going to eat in the morning, because there may not be a morning,” she said.

Thousands died
For 12 weeks they marched. Then they were told they were going to take a shower. “We knew that showers didn’t mean water,” Zaks said. “But by that time, we wanted to die. We said good-bye to each other. They shaved out heads and sprayed us with Lysol like animals.”

In her starved and weakened state, she was still able to register surprise when water spurted from the shower heads.

“Then we marched into the death camp of Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank had died a month earlier. I couldn’t walk. I was 80 percent dead, 20 percent alive. We waited for them to take dead bodies out of a room that was two times the size of this one (the cafeteria), and 970 girls were put inside. The body behind me was my pillow; the one in front, my cover.”

They had no fresh water for three months. “Don’t ask what we were drinking,” Zaks said. “We never changed clothes in three months.”

Finally, the liberation
She was taken to a hospital, where she lay on a table while lice were scrubbed off her body. The sick were sent to Sweden. Zaks lived there for a little over a year.

After that, at 19, she went to Belgium, where her aunt adopted her. “She married me off very fast,” Zaks said. She and her husband lived in Belgium for five years.

“I heard the Russians were coming, and no one was going to get me again – not the Russians or the Germans, so I came to New York. I got here on a Friday, and by Monday I had a job. I was scared to death. I couldn’t even speak English.”

But she could work, and after nine months she was made manager of the factory where she was employed.

“I never took welfare or stood in soup lines,” she said. “I’ve worked every day, all my life, to give my children the best.”

She and her husband, a tailor by profession, are retired now, but Zaks won’t sit still. She speaks to school groups an average of four times a week, using photographs and her vivid, shocking memories to impress upon kids the costs and importance of freedom.

When she invited the audience to ask questions, there was a few moments of hesitation, then hands sprang up all over.

“Was it like the movie Schindler’s List?”

“(The movie) was only 20 percent of it. It was much worse.”

“Have you ever met Hitler?”

“His own army didn’t meet Hitler face-to-face. His own people wanted to kill him.”

“Why didn’t you try to hide?”

“Nobody would have hidden me.”

“What did you eat?”

“When we ate, we had four slices of bread and soup at night. Every camp was different.”

“Do you want to find your family?”

“Nobody finds any family after 54 years.”

The children sat quietly throughout the rest of her talk. Teachers commented later that it was unusual for that many of them to be so quiet for so long. The biggest stir in the audience came when Zaks called on a hand-raiser and mistook the boy for a girl. This launched 45 seconds of whoops and whistles.

Zaks recommended the youth get a haircut.

“Many times I touch myself and ask how come I survived,” Zaks said. “But God wanted me to be here today and talk with you. God gave me life to see that what happened to me won’t happen to you.”

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