Holocaust survivor speaks to Trinity students
Sam Weinreb speaks to Trinity High School students about his experience in concentration camps and the holocaust June 6.
Trinity High School student Olivia Gray shakes the hand of holocaust survivor Sam Weinreb after his presentation. Weinreb shared his experiences of losing his family, surviving a concentration camp and escaping his captors.
A few weeks before his bar mitzvah and his 13th birthday, Sam Weinreb came home from his religion lessons to find the door locked and his family gone. He would never see them again.
Weinreb, 85, of White Oak, is a holocaust survivor. Born in Czechoslovakia, he eventually was imprisoned in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. During a death march, he fled from his German captors into a forest and was found by Russian officers. He was then taken to a military hospital, where he recovered. Weinreb didn’t tell anyone his story for years after moving to the United States. But after he started telling his story, he didn’t stop.
“I was urged to talk about it,” he said, “and once I started speaking I had so many schools call the Holocaust Center and ask me to speak. It’s not an easy story. It’s a very difficult story, but it’s the story of my life. That’s why I talked about it, hoping something like it would never happen again.”
Weinreb told his story to high school students at Trinity High School Thursday, the 69th anniversary of D-Day and the invasion of Normandy. James Tucker, a U.S. history and government teacher at Trinity, contacted Weinreb and asked him to speak.
“Ultimately, one of the goals of studying history is to make it come alive and make students learn from it,” Tucker said. “Both of those things were done with having Sam provide his experience.”
Only a head above the podium he spoke from, Weinreb looked out over the audience of high school students in the auditorium. The room was silent. All that could be heard were the slow, halting words of the Jewish man sharing his story – one of mistreatment and brutality.
After a neighbor told Weinreb that his family was gone, he helped the young boy flee to Hungary, where he met up with his uncle in Budapest. His stay with his uncle didn’t last long. A neighbor reported the fugitive, and he moved on to stay with a distant relative. But again, the police discovered him and Weinreb was forced to live on the street.
“(I) went into the city and started to look for some kind of work,” he said. “No one would hire me, but some helped once in a while.” Weinreb lived on the street for six to seven months.
“During the day, I had the difficult job of finding some food,” Weinreb told the high school students. “All of you here, (you are) older than I was. Can you imagine … not knowing where you’d sleep, if you’d have food each day?”
Weinreb soon felt that he couldn’t go on as he was, so he turned himself in to the police.
“I thought, what could they do to a 13-year-old kid whose only crime was being Jewish?” Weinreb recalled. “How wrong I was.” The police sent the young boy to prison, and it was two years later before he was released to his grandparents. But Hungary didn’t remain a safe place for long, because the Germans invaded.
“All of us were picked up and taken to a nearby city,” Weinreb said. “After a few days, (we) were put on cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz.” Living conditions at the concentration camp were brutal.
When the group entered the prison, they were separated – those sent to the left were going to work. Those sent to the right, elderly people and young women with children, were given a towel and told they were going to shower and clean up. They were never seen again.
“I was given a number and told I didn’t need to remember my name,” Weinreb said. The “welcome committee” of Auschwitz, as Weinreb called it, was a group of officers who said: “This is Auschwitz. If you’re strong enough and able to work, you may survive. If you’re not able and cannot work, you’ll be sent to the gas chambers.”
Later, the captives were ordered on “death marches.” If someone couldn’t walk or keep up, they were shot and left behind.
Weinreb knew that he couldn’t keep marching. And at that point, he was beyond being afraid. He knew he would probably die. So, he took a chance and fled. Not sure to this day how far he ran, he woke up in a Russian military hospital. And at that point, he weighed only about 80 pounds.
The holocaust survivor returned to his hometown, only to be devastated by the news that none of his family had survived. “I ended up in the most inhumane place, where thousands were murdered every day. The only thing that kept me going was the idea that if I survived, I could one day meet with my family,” he said.
Though none of his family survived, Weinreb met with one his childhood friends – Goldie. She had lived next to him while he lived with his grandparents. She urged him to move to America, and he did. They married three years later after settling down in the new country.
“(It is) extremely important for as many people as possible to hear these stories,” Weinreb told the crowd at Trinity, “especially the younger generation.”
The younger generation seemed captivated by his story. “It was the quietest the auditorium has ever been,” Tucker said.