Ben Lesser was fifteen and a half years old when the cattle car doors slid open at Birkenau. It was still night. Guards screamed orders: leave everything where it is, do not pick anything up. Women and children to the right, men to the left.
He was holding his sister Goldie and his little brother Tuli, but the crowd tore them apart. He never saw them again. They went directly to the gas chambers, although no one in that moment knew what that meant. He chose to go with the men, a decision that saved his life, and he stepped forward into the line of a doctor who flicked his finger right or left, deciding who lived and who died.
Ben Lesser had grown up in a comfortable Jewish home in the city of Kassa. He was one of seven children. His father ran a chocolate factory, the first in the region to make chocolate-covered wafers shaped like little animals wrapped in tin foil, and every day he came home with his pockets full of sweets for the children. He also produced wine and syrup.
That life ended the moment the Germans occupied the city. School stopped immediately. On the fifth day of occupation, a truck pulled up to the gate of their three-story building. The building superintendent, eager to oblige, pointed out where the Jewish families lived.
Soldiers broke down the doors at five in the morning, pistol-whipping his father, screaming for valuables. From the neighbor’s apartment came a terrible screaming. Ben and his sister Lola ran through the back door into the adjoining kitchen and saw a soldier holding a two-month-old infant by the legs, swinging it, demanding it be silenced. With a smirk, the soldier smashed the baby’s head against the doorpost, killing it instantly.
Ben has never forgotten the sight of that screaming infant falling suddenly silent. The family prepared to enter the Kassa ghetto, where more than two hundred relatives and community members were being sent. But a young man named Michael, who had feelings for Ben’s sister Lola, warned his father to leave the city instead. They went to a small community called Nagymihály.
It was the first miracle, because nearly everyone who entered that ghetto was transported to Belzec and exterminated. They hid for about a year in a farmhouse, where Ben’s father set up a small bakery to feed the family, and Ben, at twelve years old, baked alongside him. Lola married Michael, and they moved into a duplex whose other half belonged to the mayor of the town. One day the mayor came home with a warning: a raid against the Jews was coming that night or the next.
Michael hired a wagon, and the family snuck out in the middle of the night. That was the second miracle. The very night they left, soldiers went house to house, rounded up the Jewish residents, took them to the forest, forced them to dig a ditch, and shot thousands of them. The only place left to go was Berehove, a ghetto with a terrible reputation.
Every so often, dump trucks would come in the middle of the night, pull children from their beds, and throw them into the trucks while parents ran screaming behind, only to be mown down by machine guns mounted at the back. The reputation of Berehove spread across Europe, but there was no choice. One day a friendly Jewish policeman warned Michael that another raid was coming that night. By then, every home had a hiding place, a bunker.
The family’s bunker was hidden behind an ornate coat rack in the wall, with room for twelve people to stand between two buildings. They hid all night in the freezing snow, hearing dogs barking, guns firing, and screaming unlike anything Ben had ever heard. At dawn it grew quiet. When they came out, they found people lying in the snow, half torn apart by dogs, some still barely alive, blood everywhere.
Pushcarts moved through the streets collecting bodies and pieces of bodies, piling them high in the ghetto square. The Germans doused the pile with gasoline and set it on fire. Ben describes the smell of that human bonfire as true hell on Earth. They learned that a sister had been hiding in a doghouse bunker with seven other people.
Ben went to check on her. She was not there, but everyone else was in the snow with a bullet hole in the head. His sister Lola and her husband had been saved by the Jewish policeman, who moved them to a water tank in a leather tannery, where they stood neck-deep in freezing water all night and survived. Ben fled Poland, hidden in a truck between the coal and the chassis with ten others, crossed the border into Hungary, and reached safety in the summer of 1943.
But in March 1944, the Nazis marched into Hungary as if invited. They already knew every Jewish address. Within two months, trainloads of people were being shipped to concentration camps. They were told Germany needed workers, that they would be relocated, and to bring whatever valuables they could carry.
Anyone found hiding would be shot. They were loaded into an 82-person cattle car. Two buckets of water were provided, gone quickly. There were no sanitary facilities.
Within days the buckets overflowed with human waste. They sat on their bundles to stay above it. After three days and three nights, the train arrived at a place called Oświęcim, which meant Auschwitz. But the train did not stop there.
It continued three more kilometers to Birkenau, where the killing was done. After the selection, Ben’s uncle gave him diamonds hidden in his shoes. They were ordered to undress, have their heads shaved, and enter the showers. Ben refused to remove those shoes, knowing the diamonds were his only currency for survival.
Naked, wearing the black shoes, he passed the barbers while Nazis walked back and forth and no one said a word. He was sent to the barracks with the shoes on his feet. If they had seen them, he would have been killed on the spot. Inside the barracks, the block elder, a Polish inmate, walked out and told them: you Hungarian Jews think you are here on vacation.
Those chimneys, those ashes flying, those are your mothers, your fathers, your brothers, your sisters. If you do not behave, this is how you will end up. Ben could not believe his sister and little brother were ashes. This was the twentieth century.
How was it possible? After five weeks, they were taken to a rock quarry at Dörnhau. Their job was to dynamite the mountain, break boulders with sledgehammers, throw the pieces into mining carts, run them down to grinding machines to make gravel, and push the empty carts back. It was brutal labor.
Ben knew his uncle would not survive it. He bribed the kitchen chef with one of his diamonds to give his uncle a job in the kitchen. The chef accepted, and his uncle’s work became easier. Every day, everyone had to line up in rows of five to be counted.
Usually the count ended quickly. One day, the camp commandant arrived with his girlfriend and announced that three inmates had escaped. He ordered his men to pull every tenth person from the line to receive twenty-five lashes. Ben saw that his uncle would be either a five or a ten.
He pushed his uncle behind him and took his place as the tenth. They were taken to the yard with the other number tens. A sawhorse was brought out. Each man had to walk over to it, tip-toe and bend over, stomach not touching the board, heels not touching the ground.
One man pulled his trousers, another delivered the lashes. The victim had to count out loud, and if he miscounted, or if his heel touched the ground, or his stomach touched the board, the count started again from one. The first man messed up, touched the ground, fell. The commandant kicked him in the face, and when he could not get up, shot him.
His girlfriend walked over, hugged him, and kissed him for what they called a heroic act. The second man fell and was shot the same way. The third was younger, begged for mercy, tried to stand, took five steps, collapsed, and was shot. Then it was Ben’s turn.
He told himself: if you want to live another five or ten minutes, do exactly what you are told. He walked over, tipped, bent over without touching the board, and started to count. With each lash, he felt a line of blood running down his legs. Six, seven, and then he made it.
The camp fell silent. No one believed anyone could survive that. The man holding his trousers told him in Yiddish to go thank the commandant. Ben saluted and said thank you, Herr Commandant.
The commandant, hearing this, turned him around to face the remaining number tens and said: I told you it could be done. If you do it like this, you have nothing to worry about. But then there was a commotion at the gate. The three escaped inmates had been caught, bloody and barely recognizable, dragged in by their hair.
The commandant lost interest in the flogging like a child tired of a toy. He ordered the remaining number tens back into line and had a portable gallows brought in. He ordered the men to watch the hangings and warned that anyone who closed their eyes would be whipped. The first two were hanged.
The third was younger, and as the noose was placed around his neck, he began to recite a Jewish prayer, the Shema Yisrael, which is five words: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. They heard it and kicked the stool out from under him before he could finish. The camp was evacuated. They marched for seven weeks, four hundred sixty kilometers through snow, arriving at a place called Buchenwald.
They were accepted, counted, put in barracks, but the next morning the evacuation continued because Buchenwald was also being emptied. They were placed back into an 82-person cattle car. Ben pushed his cousin up and told him to find a spot against the wall. After an hour, the door opened and eighty loaves of bread were thrown in, one for each person.
Those near the door grabbed four or five loaves. Ben and his cousin, against the wall, had nothing. Ben began climbing over the seated inmates to reach the door and wrestle a loaf from someone who had several. While climbing, an inmate stabbed him with a pocket knife.
Ben felt the blade go through his tongue, felt his mouth fill with blood, but he kept going, got a loaf, and returned to his cousin, who asked why he was bleeding. Ben put his finger through the hole in his tongue. He rationed the bread, a small piece each day for two weeks, sharing it with his cousin. Around him, people were dying from starvation and thirst.
After two weeks he was out of breath, and there was still another week of travel. But they arrived at a place called Dachau. The guards ordered everyone who could walk to walk out. Four of the eighty walked out of that cattle car.
Everyone else was dead. Inside Dachau, three days later, they were liberated. Two American GIs walked up to Ben and handed him a can of Spam. They opened it, and it smelled so good.
They made a mistake and ate some of it, and dysentery came down on them. His cousin died in his arms the night after liberation. Ben does not know what he died from, only that he died. Ben Lesser survived.
He never learned why he was chosen to survive all that hell. The only answer he ever found was that God needed a witness, someone who could talk about it and tell the story, because most survivors cannot bring themselves to speak of it. For the last twenty-five years, he has devoted his life to traveling and speaking to audiences around the world, keeping the world from acquiring amnesia. Remember, he says.
Remember this happened.