Holocaust survivor recalls horrors
Ben Walker credits God and his mother for keeping him alive.
Ben Walker wasn’t supposed to speak to community leaders at the Rome Exchange Club meeting Friday. He wasn’t supposed to be in the United States either. Walker, a native of Romania, should by all rights have died with 6 million other Jewish Europeans during the Holocaust, but a desire to live, a drive to find a meal the next day when he was less than 10 years old — and a mother’s love — kept him alive and eventually landed him in America.
“The truth of the matter is I had no desire to speak about the Holocaust. I never wanted to do that. It was so terrible and I believed no one would believe me and I just put it aside,” Walker told a packed Palladium of Exchange Club members and guests Friday. “Sept. 11, 2001, I changed my mind. After 56 years of being silent about it I started to speak to different groups.”
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After World War II broke out, many Jews left Europe and went wherever they could. Walker said his family decided to stay put. In October of 1941, when he was six years old, there was a knock at his door and someone there to say the family needed to get on a train at a station about 2 or 3 miles from his home.
“It was a cattle train, we were packed in like sardines,” Walker said. People had to bribe the soldiers with anything of value, a ring, a watch, to open a window to get some fresh air into the car.
The train didn’t take Walker, his sister and parents to any of the now infamous death camps, instead they went to what he referred to as a ghetto in the Ukraine. The family was packed into a building he likened to a warehouse.
Disease was rampant and people of the small town wanted the people in the ghetto to leave. They were spread out all over the region and ended up in a barn where the only thing they had was the straw they slept on.
“The animals were gone, we were the animals now,” Walker recalled.
One morning he tapped on his father’s shoulder, but didn’t get a response. He tapped again, and again there was no response. His father was dead. He couldn’t be buried because the ground was frozen. Two weeks later his sister died. “Now you know why I didn’t want to talk about it,” Walker said.
Not long thereafter the war had started to turn sour for Hitler and the Nazis, and Walker had the chance to go to an orphanage. His mother said for him to go and that if she survived she would come for him. “It was great, I had a bed with white sheets. I even had one good meal a day,” Walker said.
In April of 1944, an officer came to the barn where his mother was still being held and said they were free to go. She reunited with little Ben and they went back to the family farm in Romania, only to learn that it been taken over by a communist family.
Walker was Bar Mitzvah’d in 1948, on the same day that Israel became a state. He later had the choice of coming to America or going to Israel. Initially he chose Israel, because it was closer, and settled on a kibbutz, working and going to school. His mother came to the United States and remarried, before contacting her son again and urging him to come to the U.S. in 1956.
Years later he wound up marrying a young woman named Ruth who came from the same small farm community in Romania. Her family was fortunate enough to have fled Europe and settled in Chile at the outset of the Hitler regime.
“I’m grateful to God and my mother for keeping me alive,” he concluded. Now a resident of Sandy Springs, he travels the state and region speaking to groups about the Holocaust.
He told the Rome group he is greatly dismayed by the hate he’s seeing around the globe today. “No Nazi soldier would have ever blown himself up to kill innocent civilians.”