1998

Holocaust Survivor Details Life

Joseph Kempler spent adolescent years in concentration camp

by Valerie Wyman

It's been over fifty years since the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps were first exposed, and for most of us, the Holocaust has become just another entry in the history books. But for Joseph Kempler, the memories will never fade.

Kempler, a Holocaust survivor, spoke last week to Dr. Viktoria Hertling's Holocaust, Genocide and Peace Studies class. The speaker took two class sessions to recount the events leading to his internment at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, and dedicated the last hour to discussing the post-war years following liberation of the camp.

Just eleven years old when he entered the internment camps, Kempler spent the majority of his adolescent years as a ward of the Nazis. In an attempt to deceive the Nazis and avoid relocation, the Kempler family initially split up and dispersed to different parts of Poland. While this action led to the deaths of his mother and one sister, the boy Kempler was able to hide in the woods until ultimately being captured and sent to work camps. His other sister was able to survive the war hiding in the home of Jehovah's Witnesses hoping to save her life; she spent two years and three months standing by day behind a wardrobe, her nights laying between the furniture and the wall.

Joseph Kempler speaking to
Dr. Hertling's Holocaust class

When the Austrian concentration camp was liberated on the night of May 5, 1945, Kempler was 17 years old and weighed only 60 pounds. American soldiers came with good intentions; survivors were offered their first real nourishment since the beginning of the war. However, their goodwill had an unintended effect as the emaciated inmates did not have enough physical strength to even digest the food. Kempler displayed a picture of inmates shortly following liberation. All were lacking trousers, because their bodies had lost the ability to process solid food, and reacted violently to any intake. Ironically, the sustenance that all had been craving during the years of weak potato skin broth and inhumane physical toil actually killed many inmates.

For the first time in years, inmates were able to voluntarily cross the electric fence surrounding the camp and enter the outside world. This freedom, though, lost its potency when survivors had no papers, money or homes to return to. Five months after liberation, Kempler was still living in the camp; he discovered his entire family had died during Hitler's reign of terror, except for his one sister. The siblings were finally reunited one year later, after almost a decade of independently cheating death.

Kempler's presentation was surprisingly devoid of emotion. Although a strong emotional reaction was evident among the class, Kempler's voice remained steady and lacked the inflections indicating emotive turmoil. He addressed the class in a straight-forward and direct manner; in recounting many of the horrors he witnessed while in the camp, he emphasized repeatedly that the only way he survived was to shut out emotion. It was not a matter of being cold or uncaring; rather, deadening emotion was the only way a little boy could endure the noxious fumes of burning flesh and piles of emaciated bodies left to rot outside the cramped barracks. Those that could not desensitize themselves to the daily horrors were the first to die. Kempler credits his survival to his skill at becoming invisible as well as "separating emotions from the intellectual mind."

As many Holocaust survivors are aging, it has become paramount to chronicle and record their testimony about the war. Steven Spielberg, after the 1994 movie Schindler's List, decided to embark on a crusade to document eyewitness testimony to the Holocaust in founding Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Their urgent mission is "to chronicle, before it is to late, the firsthand accounts of survivors, liberators, rescuers, and other eyewitnesses to the Holocaust." The foundation has amassed 100,000 hours of testimony, but as Kempler remarked to the class, many survivors are hesitant to speak about the horrors they withstood at the hands of the Nazis, and prefer to keep their memories silent.

Visit the Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Peace Studies Homepage at www.unr.edu/chgps/blank.htm