‘You couldn’t survive alone’
For many years, David Moskovic wouldn’t talk about his wartime experiences, but he never forgot the horror, the hunger and the keys to survive.
This shoe and sock, belonging to a child, were found when Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz in January 1945. At Auschwitz today, exhibits attempt to show the scale of the horror of the Holocaust through piles of footwear belonging to adults and children.
When David Moskovic washes dishes, makes the bed or performs any of the chores that constitute his day, he pays no mind to the four-digit number tattooed on his left forearm — 6024 — a faded reminder of the darkest moments in his, and humankind’s, life.
For there was a time, he recalls, when that number defined him, when you could call out his name and he wouldn’t respond. The Nazis who gave him that number, he says, were experts at dehumanizing people. There was a time, he says, when he was little more than an animal, doing whatever he had to simply to survive.
And as other survivors and their families return to Poland and Auschwitz- Birkenau this weekend to remember and commemorate Monday’s 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp by Russia’s Red Army, Moskovic will not be among their ranks. The 90- year- old has never returned to the site, and doubts he ever will.
“I wouldn’t want to go back,” says Moskovic in a phone interview from Florida, where he and his partner, Ruth Calof, are wintering. “I don’t see what I would gain by seeing the building where my mom went to the gas chambers.
“Some people go back, but I am not one of them. I have a good life and I am a happy person.”
Born in 1929, Moskovic was raised in Konus, Czechoslovakia, a small farming community of about 250 families, of which roughly 25 were Jewish. In 1939, when he was nine, Czechoslovakia ceased to be a sovereign nation, and Konus became part of Hungary, its flag simply appearing one morning outside the school he attended.
Before long, the young men of Konus were taken away, to the front to help build bunkers. They never returned, says Moskovic.
The farmers’ crops — their corn and wheat — were subsequently taken away.
And then one day, in May 1944, the town crier announced that all Jews should assemble in front of the synagogue at 10 o’clock the next morning. They, too, were being taken away, to Auschwitz- Birkenau, a concentration camp and, by then, extermination centre.
He was 14 when he arrived. “I remember getting out of the train and saw those piles of shoes and that big smokestack in front of me.”
The women and children lined up to the left, to be gassed. The men and older boys went to the right, to work. Moskovic and his father and brother were marched to Buna, a satellite camp, where Moskovic was further separated from his family and put into barracks for younger children. He recalls the children crying for their mothers during his first night there. “Those kids never survived,” he said in a testimonial produced four years ago for Carleton University’s Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship. “When they needed mommy’s help, those kids were the first ones to go.”
He was trained to lay bricks, and each day for 12 hours, fed only a piece of bread and two bowls of soup, worked on building a factory that the Allies routinely bombed. During his eight or nine months at Buna, Moskovic built and rebuilt the same section of wall.
He spent much of his time with a group of five or six other youngsters. “You couldn’t survive alone,” he says. “You had to have protection.”
To stay alive, he and others risked their lives breaking into the camp’s kitchen or arriving bread trucks, where they would pilfer bread, potatoes and whatever else they could find, then throw it over the fence to prisoners waiting on the other side. “We didn’t call it stealing,” he says. “We called it ‘organizing’.” Despite the risks, he had little concern for his safety. “We were starving, and if you told me I could have a piece of bread but then be killed, I would still have the piece of bread.”
When he could, he smuggled extra food to his father. “Because once you got too skinny, a truck would drive by and pick that person up, and you never saw the person again.”
A week before Auschwitz was liberated, Moskovic was among the more than 55,000 prisoners forced to march to Loslau camp, 63 km away, and from there shipped by train to Buchenwald, 670 km further, as Nazi Germany attempted to cover up evidence of the atrocities it had committed. The train journey took three or four days, he recalls, without food. The train only stopped to remove dead bodies. “At the end, there were so few bodies and it was so cold, so I took a dead body and put it on top of me to give me a little protection from the snow,” he recalled in his testimonial, “and I kept my mouth open so the snow would fall into my mouth and I got a little dampness on my lips.”
His father and brother, he says, died somewhere along the Death March to Buchenwald.
He was at Buchenwald for about two and a half months, initially staying alive by hiding. When he was eventually caught and put with a group marching toward the gate, which he knew meant he was soon to be shot, he fell to the ground, feigning death as others walked on top of him. When the daily quota was met and the gates closed, he joined those making their way back to the barracks.
After Buchenwald’s April liberation by U. S. troops, Moskovic returned to Konus, where he found 10 or a dozen other young survivors, including his oldest sister, Edith, but no parents. He decided to leave, hoping to start a new life elsewhere. Pretending to be married, he and another survivor were smuggled to Vienna, where he learned plumbing. In 1948, instead of travelling to the newly created Israel, he went to Salzburg, from where, after numerous failed applications, he emigrated to Ottawa. After years working for Francis Fuels, he opened his own plumbing business.
For years, Moskovic never talked about his wartime experiences, but about eight years ago was encouraged by a visiting rabbi to share his story. Since then, he’s spoken regularly in classrooms, where he also listens to children tell him about their problems.
“The day before I speak, I have to go back to that gutter,” he says, “and I swear I won’t do it again.
“But I aways do. I feel like I’m really helping these kids,” he says. “And when they hug you, I could pick out every kid who was bullied.”
And he refuses to let his past bully him. “I never look back,” he says. “I have a new life. I enjoy my life. I have three children and eight grandchildren. Life is beautiful, really.”