‘Keep the stories going’
Pain of millions of lives lost draws residents together to commemorate them and remember Nazi atrocities
My name is Joe Alexander. I am Holocaust survivor from Poland.
And I survived 12 camps. These remarks began Alexander’s speech about his six-year harrowing journey through concentration camps, grueling labor and unimaginable atrocities. Horror and sorrow and pain etched into scores of faces at Chabad of Bakersfield as they closely listened to Alexander, now 100 years old, share his story Sunday at the unveiling of the Central Valley Holocaust Memorial.
It took more than a decade to accumulate six million buttons — they poured in from every corner of the globe to create the Central Valley’s first Holocaust memorial, according to monument creators. Experts estimate six million Jewish people were killed by Nazis, though many more died. And each button represents one life lost.
“I just got the chills,” Sheri Levin Richey, who was one of the original button collectors in 2012, said after listening to Alexander and walking through the peaceful memorial.
‘I SURVIVED. HITLER DIDN’T’
Alexander and his family lived a normal, “very good” life in a small Polish town until 1939 when Germans invaded their borders, he said.
Nazis removed several families in his hometown but Alexander’s family escaped those circumstances. Alexander doesn’t know why his family wasn’t immediately chosen.
He was forced by police to work in a camp building canals in knee-high water without boots during winter months. The grueling circumstances led him to contract blood poisoning — sores pockmarked his legs and arms.
Alexander’s family was relocated to a ghetto outside Warsaw, the capital of Poland. The small area — experts say it was around 1.3 square miles — housed more than 400,000 people.
“The life in a ghetto, you cannot even imagine how miserable, how terrible it was,” Alexander said.
“People were dying every day,” he later added. “You got out in the morning — dead people in the streets, on the sidewalk. Everywhere.”
The Alexanders lived in the ghetto for five months. His parents bribed guards to let Alexander, his older sister and younger brother escape back to Poland.
Three days after they arrived home, guards ordered Jewish men ages 16 to 60 to a schoolhouse. Alexander was then taken away to a camp, and never saw his family again.
He built dams through cracking away at rocks with small picks.
For breakfast, he said he got coffee and a small slice of bread. Their lunch was a rudimentary soup cobbled together from potato peels or spinach.
“Doing this kind of work on that food, you couldn’t survive,” Alexander said. He credited civilians supplying food as the additional nourishment that allowed him to keep working.
That camp whittled down to smaller numbers because “people were dying every morning,” he added. A similar outcome unfolded at another camp, and so two camps became one.
Throughout seven camps, Alexander built cobblestone streets, sewers, roofs and an airport.
Then, a passenger train shuttled him away to Auschwitz for three days with no food, water or facilities. Forty to fifty people packed into one passenger car, he added.
Finally at Auschwitz, about 30 percent to 40 percent of the passengers had died on the train ride.
Doctor Josef Mengele, an infamous Nazi doctor known as the Angel of Death, examined riders and began separating them for human experiments or the gas chamber, Alexander said. Mengele was accused of performing sadistic, inhumane experiments, and sending 400,000 people to the gas chamber.
Mengele placed him near elderly and sick people, but Alexander slipped to another group. Alexander knew he must be lumped with big, strong men who were saved to perform work.
“If I didn’t run back to the other side, I wouldn’t be here talking to you,” Alexander said. The other group was taken straight to the gas chamber, he added.
Alexander eventually was shipped to the Dachau concentration camp and several camps around it. There, Alexander and others were set to be taken into mountains to be killed.
They walked for two days, but knew American troops weren’t far behind. The guards soon disappeared and other German guards came and took them to a village.
These guards disappeared too. Alexander and others wondered what would happen next.
An “American tank moved in the village,” Alexander said of the next morning. “We were liberated.”
He eventually went back to Poland and Germany before arriving in the United States.
“The story has to be told,” Alexander said to a reporter before his remarks.
He travels to schools nationwide to teach what was done to him. The liberation papers
detailing his escape, photos showing cramped barracks and a tattoo evoke a time too horrible to imagine, but essential to remember. Faded black ink on his right forearm reads “142584.”
“Once I got this tattoo,” Alexander said. “I lost my name.”
Asked why he didn’t remove the tattoo etched by a Nazi at Auschwitz, Alexander answers simply. Every circumstance he bore witness to will never escape him — a tattoo is the same, he said.
“I survived,” Alexander said. “Hitler didn’t.”
THE CENTRAL VALLEY HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL
The idea for a memorial was sparked by Cynthia Simonian, her family and members of a small synagogue in Visalia.
Many had relatives who survived persecution and they
wanted to teach the larger community about history, she said.
Simonian decided buttons would allow visitors to visualize what six million people looks like. And, buttons come in different sizes and shapes and colors and designs — much like how six million people are all different.
“They were people,” said Esther Schlanger, the director of Chabad of Bakersfield. “They had personalities. They were mothers, fathers, they were children. They were bakers and lawyers and psychologists and psychiatrists and doctors.” “And, they were murdered for just being born Jewish.”
Simonian started doing research about collecting buttons and joining societies and conventions dedicated to scavenging for these items. More people started reading her story, which led to boxes, envelopes and baggies
filled with buttons shipped to her from 2012 onward.
By chance, Simonian met with Esther Schlanger and her husband, Rabbi Shmuel Schlanger. She offered to donate her collection and idea to Chabad, and Esther began calling for buttons from the community two years ago.
They needed roughly 500,000, Schlanger said. Bakersfield didn’t hesitate — many donated buttons and their time to sort through hundreds of thousands to create the memorial.
Sybil Villaryo, who’s Christian, donated her great-grandmother’s box of buttons dating from the 1800s, she said. A family member was a Holocaust survivor and she wants her granddaughter to remember this memorial.
Rabbi Schlanger remembered going to Simonian’s house to collect buttons “having no idea what I was about to see.”
Boxes, buckets and packages filled the floor to the ceiling in Simonian’s garage, Schlanger said. He and his kids rented a U-Haul to spend their afternoon loading the truck. That’s when a true understanding blossomed.
“Thoughts, visions started racing through my mind,” Schlanger said as he and his kids moved box
after box into a rented U-Haul. “I thought about my grandparents, their parents, their uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters. All of them that were brutally murdered.”
“But at that moment, I felt I was holding my family in my hands,” he noted.
These histories can live on through teaching younger generations, and the Schlangers hope this site becomes a place for school field trips and others seeking to learn.
On Sunday, parents and grandparents brought their squealing and restless children to listen as Rabbi Schlanger led Alexander to be the first to see the memorial. Both men bellowed a hauntingly beautiful prayer “Ani Ma’amin” while walking to remember lives lost. Jewish people sung that song before entering gas chambers to be executed to show they “believed in the greater good,” Esther Schlanger said.
“They never gave up,” she added. Mia Odlin, 10, bounced along with her family while listening to the prayer as they walked to bear witness to all the buttons. She said she was going to tell her friends and family about Sunday’s ceremony.
“Keep the stories going,” Odlin said.