CEO Message: A8936 Redux

By David Mandel​

In July 2006, I penned an article “A8936”, my mother’s number tattooed on her forearm in Auschwitz. I recounted her five-day transport by cattle car, arrival in Auschwitz in May on Rosh Chodesh Sivan, 1944, and separation from her parents at Dr. Mengele’s infamous Left-Right life-death line selection.

My mother, Frieda Mandel nee Hersh A”H, lost 52 immediate family members in the Shoah: parents, siblings, nephews, nieces. Their names are all etched on my mother’s headstone.

My brother Yossi and I grew up with a daily dose of “lager” – camp – stories. For many years I planned to visit Auschwitz. I wanted to, needed to, see firsthand the evil perpetrated by a purported civilized society.

I am fortunate that I was able to do so on this day in August accompanied by my daughter Eliana. Her second name, Tzivia, is for my mother’s mother, as I am David for her father.

As we prepared for landing at Krakow airport for our 45-minute drive to Auschwitz, the pilot announced it was a lovely day. Indeed.

I had thought about this trip many times.

I planned it for May 2020. Covid changed many peoples’ plans.

Delaying a trip to Auschwitz is a gift from God.

Eliana and I arranged to meet Rabbi Yossi Cohen, whom she knew from her days in Michlalah seminary in Israel. Rabbi Cohen gives many tours at Auschwitz, other concentration camps, and Jewish historical sites throughout Eastern Europe.

I felt that I “knew” Auschwitz as a child of survivors. My father, Irving A”H, was in Russian labor camps.

A visit to Auschwitz requires a pre-purchased tour of the Museum for 4 or 8 hours. Following multiple security check-ins, you are told to maintain silence throughout many of the museum rooms, under an abundance of security cameras.

I will spare you the comparison or dark humor to security roll calls, required silence, and watchtowers as a prisoner.

I was impatient throughout the hours-long tour in the museum. Who needs a museum when you’ve lived your life hearing reality?

To use a cliché, Auschwitz was nothing like I expected and everything I imagined.

Rabbi Cohen walked us slowly, deliberately, through Auschwitz-Birkenau. As I walked on the railroad tracks that entered this city of death that murdered 1.1 million Jews, we paused at the exact location that the cattle cars stopped, greeted by Dr. Mengele. All this historical factual information and data, thanks to Nazi Germany’s meticulous recordings.

450,000 Czech Hungarian Jews were murdered at this site – including my mother’s family, the Hersh’s, in the months April-October 1944.

Eliana and I, both in our minds and then literally, walked as those selected for death and for life.

A life of daily, deliberate, excruciating physical, emotional, and spiritual torture.

We walked a long mile to Crematorium #5, the rooms where you undressed for the “shower” – where shower heads were not connected to water, the poisonous gas dropped through hatches, where dead bodies were shoveled into incinerator rooms, and ashes buried in an adjacent field.

Did you count how many deaths each person died?

Those lucky ones chosen to live were instructed to write their name on the suitcase they brought with them, told that they would shortly reclaim it. We “toured” – this term is nauseating – the rooms with literal tons of human hair shorn off prisoners to diminish their dignity, millions of spectacles, and shoes that prisoners were instructed to tie so they can assuredly be returned as a proper pair. And the room where my mother was tattooed. Returning to the scene of the horrific crime.

Cannot imagine the fear.

Rabbi Cohen spoke of survivor’s guilt.

The children and siblings with remorse for surviving this unimaginable calamity and feeling guilty that they survived. Many survivors returned to Auschwitz to say goodbye to the parents and siblings they left behind.

I came to Auschwitz to say hello to my mother, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins that I never knew.

We saw the countless three-tiered wooden barracks – each a small box area sleeping eight men or women – that my father-in-law, Israel Tratner A”H, often spoke about.

And I tried to imagine the cold winter months in thin clothing with no coats that my mother-in-law, Hilda Tratner A”H, often spoke of.

We saw the rows of hundreds of holes in concrete slabs that men and women used as public toilets, which then Jewish prisoners were tasked with cleaning each day.

I put on taalit and tefilin at a rail car, a small act of defiance.

I wear A8936 on a necklace because my mother wore it on her arm.

I tour Crematorium #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, all in ruins, because the Nazis are in the dustbin of history and I am their unwanted survivor.

Eliana commented that Rabbi Cohen and I were the only two men wearing a kippah amongst the throng of tourists. Yet, on that day there were hundreds and thousands there learning about the Shoah. That is good.

Going to Auschwitz is a very personal decision.

I fulfilled an obligation to myself.

And Eliana, too, is a strong survivor.