As the keynote speaker at the upcoming North Peninsula Yom HaShoah Memorial Service, Harold Gordon will relive, yet again, the horrors he experienced as a child of the Holocaust.
The service, on Monday, April 12 at Peninsula Temple Sholom in Burlingame, will focus on the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered during World War II by the Nazis as part of their “Final Solution.” The event is titled “Remembering the Children of the Holocaust.”
Over the past few years, Gordon, 68, has become a frequently sought lecturer in schools and service organizations, and he has hundreds of letters of thanks and admiration to prove it. In his lectures, he tries to focus on the futility of revenge and the affirming power of survival and overcoming hatred. But each telling is difficult for him.
“I wasn’t going to go to this one,” said Gordon, who lives in Salinas. “Each one gets more painful. But I got to thinking that this would be a good way to honor my younger brother who died at the age of 9. I guess I’m trying to speak for all the children who cannot speak for themselves anymore”
Born in the Polish town of Grodno on the Lithuanian border, Gordon began his life in a lively prewar Jewish community. In 1941, however, his life, and the lives of all the Jews in the area, took an ominous turn.
When the region came under Nazi occupation, all 30,000 or so of Grodno’s Jews were forced into a ghetto, and from there, taken to a placement camp called Kelbasin. Gordon was interned along with his mother, father and younger brother, as well as aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents.
Gordon’s father was able to escape when he volunteered to unload the wagons the Polish peasants used to bring goods to the ghetto. He bribed a Pole into allowing him to masquerade as a wagon driver.
“He went to the barracks where our family was being kept and told my mother that he was going to try to get me and my brother, who was 9 years old at the time, out of the camp, and come back later for her,” Gordon recalled. “My brother was stopped at the gate and not allowed through, but when the gates were opened, I hid in the wagon, and when they stopped the wagon to search it, I jumped out, rolled into a ditch full of snow and hid.
“When the commander decided it was too cold to continue searching, got into his fancy car and left, my father got down off the wagon and struck up a conversation with the guards, and while their backs were turned, I jumped back into the wagon and we got away,” he said.
“The following week, my father went back for my mother and brother, but discovered that they had been taken to Treblinka the night before. We never saw them again.”
Gordon was 10 at the time.
Father and son returned to the ghetto, where they hid in a cellar until the area was emptied of Jews. They then made the three-day walk to Bialystok, where the large Jewish community was still confined to a ghetto.
“Six months later, they began to liquidate that ghetto,” Gordon said, “We sort of gave up then and allowed ourselves to be transported to Auschwitz.”
Following several harrowing days in a sweltering cattle car with no food, water or sanitation, the two arrived at the infamous death camp. They lined up in front of the train. “People piled out and formed a column a half mile long and five deep. There were a couple of people there we recognized, and they whispered to my father that we would be gassed and burned that night — ‘So say your prayers,’ they said. ‘See those chimneys?’ they said. I heard all that. I couldn’t say anything to my father because then he would be forced to lie to me. I couldn’t cry; it would give everything away and make things worse.
“All I could do was wonder how much longer we had to live — a few minutes? A few hours? We were marched toward those chimneys — to the crematoria. From my angle, I could see inside. I could see dead bodies and people in striped uniforms with wheelbarrows full of bodies.”
He continued: “There were women in striped dresses with their heads shaved playing music. Soothing music. A guard grabbed me out of the line and my father came out with me. No one stopped him. In the end there were 11 of us that were given real baths, striped clothes, assigned to barracks and put to work.”
Gordon and the others were assigned to gather up victims’ clothes, cutting the lice-infested hair of other prisoners and performing hard physical labor. In all, he spent a year at Auschwitz.
“I tried to pretend to be an adult — to wear tall things and walk tall, because children didn’t last long there. The children were murdered. My father knew this and did what he could to hide me. I don’t know how I survived all the camps — it was like shooting dice — but I know how I survived Auschwitz,” he said.
“At one point, there was a call for tailors. My grandfather had been a tailor, so my father and I both said we were tailors. We were taken out of Auschwitz and brought to Orenborg, another camp that had a uniform factory. I worked on a buttonhole machine,” Gordon said. He and his father were eventually liberated by American troops.
“When I was in Auschwitz and seeing those thousands of people being gassed and burned, I had to wonder how could God let this happen to any people — especially Jews, and especially children who had not yet sinned. I lost my faith in God. But I regained it and was able to have a successful life.”
The youngest survivor of Grodno, Gordon immigrated to the United States after the war, married wife Joyce and had two sons, grandchildren and a successful business.
He has also written a book about his experiences, “The Last Sunrise,” available at bookstores and on the Web at www.peace2.com
The event is sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council, Peninsula Temples Beth El and Sholom, Congregation Sinai, the Peninsula Jewish Community Center, the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and the North Peninsula Jewish Day School.