Holocaust Survivors Speak During Special Temple Beth Zion Service
By Allison Candreva
April 26, 2007
Town-Crier Staff Reporter
Shabbat services at Temple Beth Zion in Royal Palm Beach started last Saturday morning with special time devoted to Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day).
After saying a few words about the Holocaust, Rabbi Bertram U. Kieffer introduced Morris Stern and Agnes Werber. Both are Holocaust survivors who agreed to share their stories with fellow congregants.
Stern lived in a Czechoslovakian town with his two brothers, two sisters, parents and about 100 other Jewish families. He told the congregation how the Gestapo and SS soldiers first came to take away all of the boys to dig trenches, ditches and chop down trees. Stern recalled having to do that for two weeks straight, and was only allowed to go home once.
They kept telling us we were going home in one to two weeks,
Stern said, and everyone believed them.
Stern described how everyone was then packed into train cars, with no food and nowhere to sit, and then taken to Auschwitz. He said a man with a stick pushed everyone off the trains and into lines.
He would hit us on the back with a stick, telling us which lines to go into,
Stern said.
The beds that Stern and others slept on were four or five feet high, with no mattress or hay, just wood, and had about five or six people per bed. The food he ate was bread made of sawdust and flour, old cheese and soup that the soldiers also used to feed the cows. Stern was moved from Auschwitz to Gusen, where he worked in tunnels with more than 67,000 other people. After about eight months at Gusen, Stern was moved to Gunskirchen where the Americans came shortly after and liberated everyone.
If the war had lasted two more hours,
Stern said, I would not have survived.
Werber directed her story more toward her father's experience. He was one of the six million people who did not survive the Holocaust, and she felt his story needed to be heard.
Every story is different, but in the same way they are all horror stories,
she said
When Werber was about 15 years old, the war had just started. There were new Jewish laws
out every month with restrictions and curfews that were constantly changing. Werber, her sister and her father were sent to the local police station to be interrogated for no particular reason. They ended up having to stay in the jail for 10 days, the sisters in one cell and their father in another.
The officers soon let the girls go home, but they kept Werber's father in the jail cell where he was beaten every day. At one point, the police told the girls that their father had been beaten to death, but it turned out that the officers had lied. Werber and her sister were put on a train bound for Auschwitz, and although their father was on the train, he was not with them. When they arrived, they was separated into four lines: the able men, the able women, the older children, and the sick or elderly. Werber's father was put in the sick line, and he did not make it through that night.
At the end of the service, Rabbi Kieffer read prayers for the victims of the Holocaust.
Diane Kieffer, the rabbi's wife, said, There aren't many people around today to say prayers for the parents that were lost, because 1.5 million children did not survive the Holocaust.
Stern's and Werber's stories about what they experienced have been recorded in the archives of the Shoah Foundation for future generations to learn from.
Temple Beth Zion is located at 129 Sparrow Drive, Royal Palm Beach. For more information about temple programs, call 561.798.8888.