The Horrors of the Holocaust ... Remembered
Ninety years young, Moshe Gimlan unfolded a stack of papers and, in a strong unwavering voice, began to relive the greatest horror of his life. In the process, he provided the teens, parents and teachers gathered at Temple B'nai Shalom with an emotional, graphic and first-hand history of the Holocaust.
Mr. Gimlan, a resident of Monroe and a guest at Temple B'nai Shalom as part of the Daniel Pearl Education Center's day-after debriefing following its annual multifaith trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, started at the beginning, when his family was rounded into the Plaszov Ghetto -- the site where the movie and real-life Schindler's List took place -- and ended with his liberation by the American army, with his entire family gone.
A bricklayer by trade, Mr. Gimlan was in his early 20s when the Nazis rounded up his family and thousands of other Jews into Plaszov and other Polish ghettos in advance of their eventual transport to the extermination and concentration camps. He recalled being lucky to be in Plaszov, because of Oskar Schindler, remembered for saving Jews from death by arranging for their transfer to his factory.
"Mr. Schindler was known for treating Jews in a humane way," Mr. Gimlan said.
Mr. Gimlan was soon moved from Plaszov to a work camp. Like other Jews, he was starving and very weak, but he managed to suvive -- a combination of fortitude and luck. "Hunger is worse than death," he says. "The Nazis defeated us psychologically. They treated us like slaves -- we we hungry and cold, and they made us work very hard."
For Mr. Gimlan, his youthful fitness, plus his skill as a bricklayer, allowed him to be assigned work by the Germans and to stay alive. That work included the disassembly of concentration camp barracks by the Germans when they were losing the war and sensed that the Russian Army was coming. He also fixed roofs of homes and buildings damaged by American bombs. "We watched the American planes come in and unload their bombs," he remembered.
Soon, that work ended and he was moved again -- to Auschwitz.
"We hard heard the rumors of crematoria at Auschwitz, but we didn't believe this was possible in the 20th century," he recalled, adding that later he saw the crematoria with his own eyes. "The Nazis created a whole industry of death -- figuring out how to kill people en masse."
Even near the end, with American and Russian armies closing in, the Nazis would not allow their prisoners their freedom. They took Mr. Gimlan and others on a death march through the freezing cold and snow, requiring them to jog at a steady pace despite the prisoners' near-death condition. Finally, when he saw an opportunity, Mr. Gimlan jumped into the bushes and trekked through the snow and cold to a nearby barn, where he hid and was given potatoes by the owners. Three days later, the Americans came and rescued him. He was suffering from typhus and was brought to a nearby hospital, where he was treated, ironically, by German nurses and spent the next few months recovering from his ordeal.
Mr. Gimlan admits that it is still very hard to talk about his experiences, but "I have to do it," he says.
"We have Darfur. We have Somalia. It doesn't stop," he said.
Then, he added forcefully, looking directly at the teens, "We should not be silent when we see such horrors."