Marking Humanity: Stories, Poems, & Essays by Holocaust Survivors. Shlomit Editor Kriger
In this way, we all step into a different country. Not all of us into the same one. No, fate directs us into all of the countries of the world. It does not care where to.
Words that we did not know a few years ago have taken form and come to life, and they pursue us even in our dreams. Wherever one goes, one hears only: “Will you be called for a hearing soon?”; “My G-d, I have number 26,000”; “Will your child be sent away?”; “What are your American relatives doing?”; or “Do you have an affidavit?” Words such as sponsorship, children’s transport, U.S.A., municipal office, Aid Society, passport, steamship ticket, export duty, suitcase, furniture, clothing, climate, etc. are the order of the day. Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Ohio, and many more have become familiar to us. Daily, this one and that one receives letters bearing all kinds of foreign stamps.
These are the inescapable consequences of emigration, and we have to bear them. I believe that we are gradually getting used to them.
George Scott
George Scott (originally Spiegel) was born in Hungary in 1930. His father died when he was only a year old, and his maternal grandparents raised him. After completing Grade 4, his grandparents placed him in the Budapest Jewish Orphanage, where there were about 120 boys, aged six to 18. He tried to run away from the orphanage when the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, but he was caught on the border of Slovakia and taken to Sarvar, a large concentration camp. In August of that year, he was transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland. Although he survived the Holocaust, he lost five of his mother’s six sisters and all of their children and husbands, as well as his grandparents.
The Canadian Jewish Congress, along with other agencies, assisted in bringing over 1,000 child survivors, including George, to Canada. George was 18 when his ship arrived in the summer of 1948. He stayed in Nova Scotia with several families who took him in, and he later moved to Toronto, Ontario. Having changed his last name to avoid prejudice during the Holocaust, he ended up settling on Scott.
In 1954 George married Ruth Levstein, and they had three children. Ruth died suddenly in 1978.
George is now in his third marriage, with artist Harriet Brav-Baum, and also has two stepchildren. For over 30 years, he has enjoyed speaking to schoolchildren about the Holocaust.
Auschwitz 1944
George Scott
Not close enough for warmth
The lusty flames
In the crematorium’s busy chimney
Rise and fall
Indifferent lies
The barbed wire’s shadow
On the frozen ground
Very thin is the line
Between being and not being
The night is emptied
Rosh Hashanah 1944 in Birkenau
George Scott
(Read at a 2006 ceremony by the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem Holocaust Wall of Remembrance at Earl Bales Park in Toronto, Ontario)
Forever will you live, in our dreams and in our prayers,
in our imagination, and in the whisperings of hope!
Words, words, that is all we have
To bring out, to drag out, to talk about the dread
Words that erupt, feelings so basic they cannot wait to be pressed
Into words
Such is our deep and anguished cry for our Massacred Innocents
It is one week to the day many years ago
When the first “Selection” inside the Gypsy Camp took place
This diabolic act marked Birkenau’s Rosh Hashanah,1 1944
Dislodged multitudes transfixed
Six o’clock “Appell”2 in Birkenau’s Gypsy Camp
Naked bodies, five deep in a row, stood waiting, hoping for reprieve
Breath suspended as if held by vacuum
Tall, chest out, the light faded from sunken eyes
To the back of us, on the other side of the tracks
Squat and rectangular behind a wooden fence, only the top half seen
The gas chamber’s red brick chimney’s insatiable flames
Between barbed wire, electrified geometric enclosures
Look-outs, “We see you” Guard Towers, built into the fence
The “Zwillings” or “Twins” on one side of us
On the other side, bald, shaven women, striped like us
Mothers, daughters, starved, faded, beyond reach
Rats the size of small dogs, most active at night
In one of our barracks, on the “odd number” side
One-hundred concrete holes, back to back, to sit on
Three circular wash basins, metal rings, eighteen inches off the ground
When stood on, chlorinated cold water poured
Spray that brought me back to life
The only place in here for us to drink
Entering, on the left, on wooden shelves, no shortage of soap
Stacked unwrapped, RIF stamped on them, in ample supply
They were pasty grey like death
No way, not “Pure Jewish Fat” we are now assured
Like echoes in an infernal cathedral
The sound of Mengele’s3 boots approach
They halt, closer they draw
The unstoppable beat of our numbed lives
Quickens in our chests
The dividing encounter
Eyes seeking eyes, light seeking light
Piercing steel grey eyes, a prodding look,
A tired face, a pair of steel grey eyes
I scooped up my clothes and scurried
To the group where he motioned me to go
A fresh lungful of Silesian air housed my panic
Another shameful, ignoble day crowded into eternity
Panic and horror, pictures cannot describe
The sparks of G-d within us all
Prompt me to remember our voiceless outrage
I did not look a while, although I knew
Toronto’s Yad Vashem stands here
Not merely a monument and warning
But the live hopes, our own parts
Innocent souls still demanding justice
Martyred beloved ones
Holy, Holy, Inextinguishable Lights