To have lost loved ones in the Holocaust, survivors will tell you, is a wound that never heals. Being privy to details of the torture those loved ones endured before dying is a wound that festers, open and searing as fire.
Just ask René Molho.
For the past 50 years, the Greek-born Alameda resident, a survivor of Auschwitz, has lived with knowledge of gruesome experiments performed on his younger brother Sam by Nazi doctors in the camp.
There, doctors removed one of Sam’s testicles without using anesthesia — part of a so-called experiment to test the vitality of sperm.
A short time later, after doctors removed Sam’s remaining testicle, the young man died at age 20.
Even now, Molho cannot utter his brother’s name without tears spilling from his gentle eyes. Sam was handsome, athletic, straightforward and honest, the 77-year-old recalls.
“It’s how he died,” Molho says, his voice choking with emotion. “He was my best friend. I still miss him. I think of him a lot.”
Loss has woven itself deeply into the tapestry of Molho’s life.
During the war he lost not only his brother but also his entire family, save one first cousin. Some 15 years ago, Molho’s only child — a son named Sam after his late uncle — collapsed and died of a heart attack at age 32. Before that day, he had not been diagnosed with heart troubles.
“I was very close to my son,” Molho says. “He used to wake me up at one in the morning to tell me jokes. We both loved jokes.”
Despite the magnitude of loss that has shadowed Molho’s life, the survivor loves to laugh.
When a Bulletin photographer poses him for a portrait, suggesting a step to the left, then one to the right, Molho has a question: Does the photographer want to dance? And one more thing: When she’s done with the photo shoot, will she send his pictures to Hollywood?
“I have a good sense of humor,” Molho says with a warm grin. “It’s another gift that helped me to survive.”
To have spent two years in Auschwitz was to endure starvation, beatings, terror, humiliation. Asked how he emerged from such conditions alive, Molho offers three simple words: “I was lucky.”
Indeed, of the various countries whose Jews were driven from their homes during the war, Greece lost a particularly high percentage. Of some 48,000 Jews deported from Molho’s hometown of Salonika, for example, only about 1,100 returned.
“For Greek Jews, it was so much harder to survive,” explains Molho, a board member and former vice president of the Holocaust Center of Northern California. “They did not even speak German. Most couldn’t understand directions.”
Molho, fortunately, could understand German and a bit of Yiddish. He has always had a penchant for languages; today, he speaks eight — “everything except English,” he jokes.
But Molho believes he may have harbored another advantage in Auschwitz as well.
Trained as an oral surgeon before the war, he was spared death on at least one occasion because camp records listed him as an M.D. For some reason, he says, the Germans resisted killing doctors.
It has been years since Molho practiced medicine.
Though he did so briefly in Europe following the war, his wartime experiences affected him so deeply he felt he had no choice but to surrender the medical career he had worked so hard to attain.
“When I practiced in Europe, I had nightmares and I was sweaty. I wasn’t physically able,” he says. “I didn’t think it was fair to my patients to operate.”
So upon immigrating to this country with his wife, Tillie, in 1951, he forged a new path, working for more than 30 years in management for Sears Roebuck in Oakland.
The position afforded Molho a degree of material comfort: Until the 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm destroyed it, the Molhos lived in a spacious hillside home with a panoramic view.
Today, the Molhos’ new home in Alameda exudes a certain cheer. Skylights pour a pearly glow into the entryway. Carpets, walls and furniture are off-white and pastel.
But as pleasant as it is, the home lacks the history of the Molhos’ former residence: Mountains of photographs, mementos of deceased family members, gadgets and works of art collected over years of travel — all of those perished in the blaze.
“It didn’t affect me as much as it affected my wife,” Molho says. “I’m not attached to material things at all.”
The survivor is attached to memory, however. Or perhaps memory is attached to him, creeping up on him through nightmares and overwhelming flashes of emotion.
Molho has learned to live with that.
“If I feel blue, I do something else. I go and play with my computer or something,” he says. “I have it in the back of my mind that nobody can help me emotionally. I have to help myself.”
Still, Molho admits that he does find comfort in others, namely his wife, Tillie, a vivacious 69-year-old who survived the war in hiding in Athens and whose easy smiles and humor nearly match her husband’s.
“You have to be very strong for them because when they need you they really need you,” Tillie says of survivors. “You need to say, `It’s all over, it’s OK.'”
And there is the sustenance Molho derives from involving himself in community organizations and sharing his story with students in local schools, something he started doing to fight historical revisionists who deny the Holocaust’s truth.
“It helps me,” Molho says of his public speaking engagements, explaining that sharing is better than “having everything enclosed into my brain, into my heart.”
This summer, Molho took another crucial step in assuaging and coming to terms with the pains of his past.
For the first time since his liberation, he traveled to Auschwitz. Though his wife tried to discourage him from going, fearing it might provoke intense anxiety, Molho felt driven to make the trip for the sake of “closing the door.”
There, at the entrance to the camp, he gazed up at the metal overhang that welcomed arrivals: “Arbacht macht frei,” it reads. “Work will make you free.”
He visited bunkers where prisoners once slept, six to a single space smaller than a coffin. He visited the rows of latrines where inmates relieved themselves en masse without a shred of privacy. And he visited the ovens where prisoners once full of life were turned to piles of ash.
Most importantly, perhaps, Molho visited the camp’s infamous Block 10, where Josef Mengele and his team of Nazi doctors performed medical experiments on prisoners, including Molho’s brother Sam. There, Molho bowed his head and recited the Kaddish.
“It was good,” Molho says through his tears. “I felt good.”