photo by Jessica St. James

Irene Zisblatt points to the area of her arm where a tattooed number used to be when she was a little girl during the Holocaust. Zisblatt addressed students from Fairland High School Wednesday afternoon about her experiences in Nazi concentration camps and her life afterwards during a special presentation.

A Survivor’s Story

Woman shares experiences of Holocaust

By Benita Heath | The Tribune

Published Thursday, February 26, 2009

PROCTORVILLE — It was more than a challenge. It was a plea from one of the few Holocaust survivors still alive today to the students of Fairland High School.

Never again allow humanity to be consumed by evil against itself.

That was the message of Irene Zisblatt when she spoke to a high school assembly Wednesday afternoon. Zisblatt, an Hungarian Jew, was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust.

She endured Auschwitz, the barbaric experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele and a Death March from the concentration camp to Loslau in during a brutal January winter.

As she watched the gas chambers churn out its victims into ash and the cattle trains bring in more, she made a vow.

“Through the shouting, the barking dogs, the cries of despair in different languages, I knew I must fight the darkness. I must live and tell,” Zisblatt, now 78, told the students.

She survived the factories of death, but kept silent for decades, not even her own children knew her story. But that changed when Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” hit the screen.

Then Zisblatt joined the March of the Living that annually takes teenagers through the death camps to teach them what happened during World War II.

In an interview before the assembly, Zisblatt became momentarily speechless when asked her reaction the first time she re-entered Auschwitz.

“I saw my whole family in the gas chamber and I heard my mother saying to me, ‘Stop crying. Do what you must do and that is when I started this,’ ” she said.

“This” being a constant schedule of speaking engagements, especially at schools, talking about the brutality of the Nazis.

“There is a pressing need to educate about the evil that took place,” she said. “Genocide is possible anytime, anywhere.”

Her story begins when she was 13 when her family was herded onto cattle cars, first to a ghetto, then to Auschwitz.

She had heard friends of her parents talk about the atrocities going on, but so many found the tales beyond belief.

“No one believed the most civilized people were doing the most barbaric things,” she said.

Ripped away from her parents and five siblings, Zisblatt was alone.

One night crying for her mother, she tried to leave the barracks where she was housed. A guard stopped her, then pointed to a chimney.

“You mother is just about now coming out of those chimneys,” she was told.

Zisblatt was too young to understand she was being told of mother’s murder.

Soon she became a human guinea pig for the experiments of Mengele. She had chemicals injected into her eyeballs to see if the color of the iris could be changed. She was given other chemicals in a test to destroy her reproductive organs.

“I called to God, but God wasn’t there,” she said. “But I couldn’t blame God. He didn’t create the Holocaust. I was not losing faith.”

She escaped the gas chamber, only to be sent to a labor camp. There she was forced with 5,000 other women on a Death March through the snows. For three months, she endured brutal cold and starvation, until she and a companion escaped.

Hiding out in a forest, they were found by American soldiers. Weighing no more than 40 pounds, Zisblatt still remembers the look of astonishment the soldiers, ignorant of the Nazi horrors, gave her.

“God knows I didn’t look human,” she recalled. “Who is going to believe a child for such a nightmare.”

But she was free — and alone, at the age of 14.

However, in two years after a stay in a displaced persons camp, she was on her way to America.

After seeing Spielberg’s film, Zisblatt found a mission.

“I knew it was duty to be a witness,” she said.

And it is now the duty of a new generation, she believes.

“It is going to be up to you,” Zisblatt said. “If we promote tolerance, it will change lives. It has to start with you. You are the last generation to know the survivors. Your children will not know a survivor. Those lives of hell can become lives of hope.

“Accept my legacy … work for understanding and tolerance. … No matter how small you think you are, you can make a difference.”

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