1998

'That I Survived, I Consider A Mircle'

Fifty years ago, the end of Germany might in World War II meant the end of the Holocaust. But for many, the horror of the extermination camps has never gone away.

by Mike Henderson

The Nazi reign of terror is 50 years gone, but Jon Zieba still weeps.

And the rain of tears, he hopes, will never end.

Zieba, 77, wants people to remember the horrors of the Holocaust.

Images of human misery and grotesque deaths are tattooed on his psyche. He hears the screams as he sleeps in the serenity of Galena Forest's pines.

But his left forearm bears a real tattoo -- the number 66.

Before World War II was over. numbers on forearms of Nazi concentration camp prisoners would reach several digits. In Nuremberg's war crimes trials, Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess would say that more than 2.5 million people, most
of them Jews, were executed at his camp. Another
500,000 starved to death.

VICTIM: Jon Zieba holds the identity card he
received after his liberation by Allied forces.

"That I lived through it and survived, I consider a miracle," Zieba said last week, a tear trickling from blue eyes set deep beneath his shaggy brows.

On June 16, 1940, Zieba became one of the first Polish political prisoners taken to Auschwitz.

"When we arrived, Hoess got out in front of us and he told us there is only one way out of here - the chimney of the crematory, " Zieba recalls.

"The next night, one of the guys I was with went bananas. He was yelling and screaming. He did not stop until they killed him."

Death never left his side.
"I witnessed an incident when a son covered his father with dirt and killed him because an SS man told him to do so," Zieba said. "The things over there were just unbelievable."

In Krakow, Poland, shortly after he received his master's degree in chemistry, he was a member of the Polish underground. He fell under suspicion from the Germans, who arrested him and shipped him to prison, then to Auschwitz.

After he arrived, the Germans found Zieba's name on a roster of underground members.

Then the interrogations began. His hands would be tied behind him. He would be hoisted erect.

He would be given 50 lashes with a bullwhip.

"I got beatings like someone had dipped me in blood," he said. "I think they should put that here in the United States, where crime is exploding. Once you get 50 lashes, you remember. Your back swells up like a balloon.

"I was young - strong like a bull - tough. It is hard to kill a man, I will tell you that."

Prisoners had their own system of justice. If someone took someone else's food or informed on another prisoner, they would be killed.

The Germans didn't care, Zieba said. To them, it was one less prisoner.

For a while, Zieba was a plumber, helping build luxury housing for the SS.

He sang with the camp's orchestra.

Zieba also worked in the wood shop, where prisoners built furniture and carved sculpture for the Nazis.

In the woodworking shop, he was assigned to build two kayaks and a canoe for Hoess' children.

He was in no rush to build them. Each day the boats were unfinished meant another day of survival.

HAUNTED: In 1940, Jon Zieba, above, now a local resident,
became one of the first Polish prisoners taken to the Nazi
death camp at Auschwitz. There he had the number 66
tattooed on his left forearm.

"I told my work supervisor, 'Not yet, not yet,' " he said. "I was playing for time."

And time almost caught up with him.

A day came when he was among 300 prisoners scheduled for execution.

In striped uniforms with the red triangular cloth patch bearing the letter P - Polish - they marched toward their deaths.

Zieba's supervisor asked Hoess to spare the handsome young man's life. The supervisor told the commandant he had nobody else with the skill to build the boats.

Hoess made a telephone call. Zieba was separated from the group and returned to the shop.

"If he had waited one-half hour longer to make that call, I would be dead," Zieba said.

For many, death came as a result of squalid living conditions.

The toilet was a room with a hole in the floor. Rations were meager.

When an SS trooper shot a cat, it became a good meal for prisoners.

Once, Zieba recalls, an SS man went into a building and left his German shepherd guard dog tied outside, unattended. By the time the SS man returned to get his dog, the animal was already being cooked, Zieba said.

"People were dying like flies," he said.

At first, prisoners slept on straw sacks on the floor of a building similar to a gymnasium. As more prisoners came, platforms were built one on top of another, bunkbed fashion. There were no more sacks, just straw scattered on the platforms.

Men slept on their sides so more prisoners could be wedged in.

Four years after his arrival at Auschwitz, Zieba was shipped to Czechoslovakia as a slave laborer.

There, in an underground factory, Hitler's Germany was building motors for the deadly
V -1 and V-2 rockets.

America's Russian allies began their advance in Czechoslovakia.

"Hitler ordered the commandant to put all of us prisoners deep underground with the factory and blow us up," Zieba said.

But the commander disregarded the order.

"The commandant gave us a piece of bread and took us a few miles outside the city and he said goodbye," Zieba said.

Now fending for themselves, the prisoners laid low and lived off the land.

"At Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia, there was an American soldier on a bridge," Zieba said. "We waited a half day under cover. We got out and the American soldier told us that whoever wanted to go to the American side could do so. They said we could come in."

By this time, Zieba had contracted typhus and was weak.

In a hospital where he was recuperating, he met Victoria, who became his wife. Together, they went first to England, then to the United States, where her brother had agreed to sponsor them.

Zieba worked for Whitehall laboratories in Elkhardt, Ind., retiring there.

Today, the couple have three children. For more than a year the couple have lived in Reno, housesitting at their son's home while he is away at school. An Army captain, Michael Zieba is studying Eastern European languages in Kansas. Another son, Les, lives nearby.

Jon Zieba

Since his days at Auschwitz, Zieba has built perhaps 10 more kayaks. He built some for his children, painting them red, white and blue in honor of the U .S. bicentennial in 1976.

He built another for a friend in the Polish navy, who won the European championship in the craft Zieba originally designed for Hoess' children.

Hoess was convicted of war crimes by a Polish court and sentenced to death.

He was hanged at Auschwitz.
"In Auschwitz," Zieba recalls, "you could see a human being at his highest and his lowest. The impact is diminishing, and in this respect the Jews are right - keep it alive.

"Most people get tired of listening to this. But it can happen anywhere.

Facts on file

- Holocaust victims:
Of the approximately 11 million people put to death by the Nazis, 4 million to 6 million were Jews. The remainder were gypsies, political prisoners, trade unionists, homosexuals, Protestants, Catholics, petty criminals and dissenters.

- The camps:
The Nazis began using crude forms of concentration camps soon after Hitler came to power in 1933. As the Nazis gained strength, they began opening new camps, where their self-proclaimed enemies of the state were placed. After 1940, the Nazis devised extermination camps as part of their infamous "Final Solution," the plan to exterminate all Jews. Three of the more notorious of these camps were Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka.

- Fighting back:
Jews and others whom the Nazis persecuted staged several uprisings against their oppressors. The most famous was in the Warsaw ghetto in spring 1943. The ghetto had been used by the Nazis as a holding area for nearly 400,000 Jews. The Nazis eventually set about moving the Jews to concentration and extermination camps. Not all went quietly. About 60,000 Jews, mostly unarmed, fought regular Nazi troops for about a month before they were overwhelmed.

Sources: World Book Encyclopedia, Dictionary of the Second World War, Encyclopedia Britannica.

Jud Allen: 'It was beyond anything I could even imagine'

It was 50 years ago that Allied troops began liberating the Nazi death camps. Northern Nevadans recall that time, and tell how the Holocaust touched their lives.

by Mike Henderson

Jud Allen went into Nazi Germany's Buchenwald concentration camp as allied forces were liberating the 21,000 remaining inmates it held.

More than 100,000 people from German-occupied countries had died there from starvation and other causes.

An hour later, Allen emerged a man forever changed.

Assigned to the First Army press camp, Allen, a Reno resident who is now 78, was asked by two war correspondents to drive them to the
camp.
Jud Allen

Months earlier, he had lost many fellow soldiers in the bloody Battle of the Bulge.

"As we drove through a beautiful forest on a warm April day in 1945. I had never felt more happy to be alive," he said. "There were no thoughts about where we were heading and what we might encounter."

In the forest, they came upon a stockade. There was a sign on the gate: "Our Fatherland, Right or Wrong." They went inside.

"I saw large, open ditches filled with what appeared to be logs," Allen said. "They were open graves filled with naked bodies. I recall the terrible stench of rotting flesh. I recall walking through the barracks and listening to the moaning of the dying. One man was too weak to push aside a dead person who partially covered him.

"It was beyond anything I could even imagine. I realized that I was part of the human race and that we must all share in man's inhumanity to man. To witness my fellow human beings stripped of all dignity was beyond anything I had ever comprehended.

"I couldn't wait to get out of there."

The visit left him with a penetrating sense of guilt.

"It affected me more than any incident in my entire life," Allen said. "To have never been a victim of prejudice and to see the ultimate punishment to a race that was considered inferior is a great shock."

In truth, he said, the liberating soldiers were not without guilt of their own.

"We came from a society that treated minorities badly, and I think that while we were passive in our prejudice, my guilt came from that source as much as anything.

"We 're all conditioned with prejudices the minute we're born, and I've spent the last 50 years trying to get rid of them."

The eperience, he said, has made him sensitive to other people's feelings.

"When I was growing up," Allen said, "I was taught not to rock the boat as far as race relations were concerned, because things would all work out in time - generations from now.

"We can't be talking about changes in three or four generations. That does nothing for the people of today."

UNR expert: Holocaust over but genocide still flourishes

The Holocaust is over, but genocide flourishes and must be stopped, says Viktoria Hertling, director of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Peace Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno.

She cites mass killings in Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere as reminders of the Holocaust and what mankind is capable of doing to other human beings.

And attacks on homosexuals and blacks by neo-Nazi skinheads in this community bring the point home, she said.

Established this year, the center is located in her office on the UNR campus.

But already the center has embarked on an oral history project, lectures in public schools and a series of lectures featuring guest speakers on the UNR campus.

Hertling also is working on a program to help public school teachers deal with hatred on their campuses. She wants to create an academic minor degree in Holocaust, genocide and peace studies.

Next year, she plans to host an international seminar on children in the Holocaust and under fascism, bringing 50 to 60 people from around the world to the center.

Hertling's mother helped several Jews escape from Nazi Germany while Hertling was a youngster.

After World War II, when Hertling was 14, a new Jewish synagogue that had been built in Cologne had been defaced. She went with friends and fellow students to help clean it up.

"We tried with soap and brushes to obliterate it," Hertling said. "But it takes more than soap and water to eradicate the past."

Ever since, she said, the subject has been a passion for her.

And that passion has resulted in nasty telephone calls, mail and threats at her Reno office.

"I do this," she said, "out of an ethos that is not related to a personal loss or a particular religious persuasion."

For information about the Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Peace Studies, contact director Viktoria Hertling at 784- 6767. The address is Mail Stop 100, College of Arts and
Sciences, University of Nevada, Reno 89557-0034.

Yoshi Hendricks: Mom outsmarted Nazis

by Mike Henderson

As a girl, Yoshi Hendricks lived in both Germany and Japan when they were at war with the United States and its allies.

Her mother, Thelka Berger, was a German Jew who married a Japanese man, an official at the Japanese Embassy in Berlin.

"Many times," Hendricks recalls, "the Germans would come looking for her brother, who was a troublemaker," said Hendricks, a cataloger at the University of Nevada, Reno library .

Anytime the bell rang, she would pick me up in her anus and peep through the peephole.

" And she had a suitcase always packed. If there was an SS man at the door, she was ready to pick up the suitcase and go down the fire escape."

Yoshi Hendricks

Her parents married in London, she said, because Jews were not allowed to marry outside their race.

Hendricks' mother was a doctor, and after many German Jews had escaped, she remained in Germany, caring for Hendricks' seriously ill grandfather until his death. Her mother, Hendricks said, feared that because he was Jewish, Germans would not take care of him.

"My mother specialized in child psychiatry and she never told me of the persecution," Hendricks said.

And her mother never spoke disparagingly of Hitler for fear her child might make an offhand remark in kindergarten that would trigger a visit from the Gestapo.

"All the store windows had pictures of Hitler ," Hendricks said. "My mother taught me 'There's Uncle Hitler.' She was really smart about that. You don't tell a child anything that you don't want to have repeated."

After her grandfather's death, her parents took her to Tokyo. The travel was arranged fairly easily because of her father's diplomatic status and because Japan was Germany's ally, Hendricks said.

But after they arrived in Tokyo, the United States began bombing the city. Women and children were sent to the countryside.

Even from 150 miles away, she could hear the bombs explode and feel the earth tremble, she said.

When the war ended, "Tokyo was rubble," Hendricks said. "There were no jobs."

But her mother was a strong and practical woman, Hendricks said. She went to U.S. occupation officials and got a job as a doctor for the Japanese employed in menial labor.

As a German-trained doctor, her services were valued and she was respected by Japanese physicians, Hendricks said.

Although her mother cared for Japanese, she worked in the same building with U.S. doctors, Hendricks said.

"Her English improved," she said. "She was a mother figure to many American enlisted men 17 to 20 years old. Some of them openly told her they were Jewish. And she found out high-ranking officers could be Jews. She was amazed.

"She could not believe the American military held special religious services for the Jews. Her Jewish awareness just blossomed. That was the beginning of her coming out of the closet as a Jew."

Pointing to Hendricks, a staff member told her mother, "When that little girl grows up, she will have to come to the University of Texas. "

She did, staying with that man's family when she first arrived in Texas.