It had been three-and-a-half days over the rails without food, water, or a place to lie down among the 120 people packed into the space of a cattle car when Renee Firestone found herself before the gates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
She had been separated from her family during the journey — which had included nightly stops that were filled with the terrifying sounds of shooting and screaming — and was now reunited with her sister and mother, all being pushed into a line leading to a Nazi officer who was directing the newly arrived persons into one of two groups: one to the left and one to the right.
The officer directed Firestone's mother to the group on the left and directed Firestone to the group on the right. At 20 years old, Firestone was hale and healthy, with blonde hair and blue eyes — not the stereotyped picture that Nazi propagandists had spread across Europe of the average Jewish person.
Her sister, who was clinging to Firestone's arm in the line, was dark-haired and dark-eyed and just 14 — a year younger than the median age the Nazis had chosen for children to be at the camp. Those younger than 15 were usually sent off to the gas chambers immediately.
Firestone stood resolute before the officer, not willing to leave her sister's side. She looked into his eyes and he tapped her on the shoulder, motioned the two girls to the right and said, simply, “Go.”
“So we both just started running towards a group of strong women, looking like me and they're yelling something at us,” Firestone said. “They're saying something like, ‘You're lucky not to be shot' and something else about a Mengele. And I'm saying to myself, ‘What's a Mengele? I've never heard of a Mengele.'
“Later we understood. That officer separating people was none other than Josef Mengele. They called him the Angel of Death. And to the left went the old people and the children, to be put on trucks to go to the gas chambers.”
As Firestone — who has toured the world telling the tale of her survival at Auschwitz — related this story to more than 200 eighth-graders at Ralston Middle School last Friday, what would normally be a raucous crowd of kids was riveted into a rapt silence so deafening only Firestone's voice and the faint buzz of flourescent lights were audible.
“She has a message,” said Beth Seldin Dotan of the Institute for Holocaust Education in Omaha, who accompanied Firestone on her trip to RMS. “Maybe it's more of a plea. She's really asking these students to think about who they are and what they do in life and how that will be received as they live. It's a very powerful thing.”
Firestone now makes her home in Los Angeles and was a key figure in the 1998 Steven Spielberg-produced documentary film “The Last Days.” She is also a founding lecturer for the Simon Wiesenthal Center Education Outreach program and a volunteer at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, the companion museum to Washington, D.C.'s Holocaust Museum.
Last week, Firestone delivered lectures at Omaha North High School and Omaha South High School, along with Omaha-area Holocaust survivors who also spoke at events at other metro area schools. The effort was part of the Freedom Writers program begun a decade ago by California teacher Erin Gruwell, who generated interest in writing about the Holocaust among her students and has since started the Freedom Writers Foundation which promotes awareness of civil rights causes around the world.
Shelley Sheets, a language arts teacher at RMS, participated in a Freedom Writers program with two dozen Omaha-area teachers last summer and helped make the middle school one of Firestone's stops during her tour.
“I'm just so thankful Renee came all this way to do this for us,” Sheets said. “It really was an incredible event for the students, and I think it's something they'll take with them forever. And she has a message that they need to hear – that you try to get to know people before you make any judgements about them.”
A colleague of Sheets' in the Freedom Writers project and a teacher at Omaha North, Laura Geiger, was also instrumental in leading the campaign to bring Firestone to Omaha.
Geiger said Firestone's presentation was well received by her students, who saw in Firestone's story a message of hope for their own situations.
“I think a lot of kids, even some who are growing up in poverty and have had difficult lives see Renee and say, ‘Wow, Mrs. Firestone made it, others made it, maybe my life is not so bad and maybe I can make a difference the way she is,'” Geiger said. “It's had an impact on them and the message, that hating is hurtful, that's getting through to them, too.”
By the time she encountered Mengele at Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 Firestone, a Czechoslovakian Jew, had lived for six years under the Nazi Germany-supported government of Hungary, which in 1938 had been allowed to partition the southeastern corner of Czechoslovakia, including her hometown of Uzhhorod.
For those six years, the Jewish population of Uzhhorod had been subjected to anti-Semitic laws and had lost basic civil rights. And as World War II raged around them they heard disquieting rumors of the mass murder of thousands of Polish Jews at the hands of German occupiers.
In May 1944, as Hungarian president Miklós Horthy tried to appease Hitler by offering up some but not all of its Jews, the Germans marched into Hungarian territory, including Uzhhorod, and demanded the immediate deportation of the Jewish population to Auschwitz.
Firestone, her father, her mother and her sister, along with the rest of the city's 8,000 Jews were each told to pack a single suitcase and report to the train depot for deportation.
“At this point, I asked my father, ‘Will we survive?'” Firestone said. “‘Are they just going to turn around and machine-gun us?' And my father said, ‘Hitler is a liar and we cannot trust a word he says. But he needs our labor now and I do not think he will kill us.'”
Firestone said she was not sped by her father's answer and her brother had already escaped the city as the Germans marched in — opting to try his luck with one of the partisan armies supporting the Soviet Union's fight against the Wehrmacht — but she nonetheless packed her suitcase and prepared for departure.
In the course of packing, Firestone came across a bathing suit her father had once given her on returning from a business trip. Firestone wrestled with whether or not there was enough room in her tiny valise to carry the suit along and decided there was not.
“But I got to thinking about it and thinking about it and as the Hungarian gendarmes were walking up to our house to take us away, I ran back to my room, I put it on under my clothes and off we went,” she said. “I kept thinking that I should take this bathing suit with me and maybe it would help me remember all the wonderful times we'd had.”
Upon arriving at the camp and watching her mother trucked off to a fate ending in what the Nazis envisioned as a death factory, Firestone, her sister and the rest of those selected by Mengele for temporary survival, were beaten and forced to strip naked.
“And all this time I've had on the bathing suit and standing there in the bathing suit, I kept saying to myself that I couldn't take it off,” Firestone said. “I was having a premonition that if I took it off, all good things would be lost.”
But a guard walked up to her, slapped her in the face and made her take it off.
“And I didn't just leave that bathing suit behind and all the wonderful memories,” Firestone said. “I left my family, my neighbors, my friends — none of them would come back with me. I was convinced that was the last day of my life.”
That night, as the fires of the crematoria lit the sky and shadowed the thick plumes of smoke that began rising above the camp from the four chimneys, the women in Firestone's group began shouting: “Where are we?” One of those among them said plainly, “We are in hell. This is Lucifer's inferno.”
“And someone else said, ‘No, those are the factories we'll be working in,'” Firestone recalled. “And someone else said, ‘No, those are bakeries. They're going to be feeding us soon.'”
But the next day, as the camp's female overseers came to line the women up for a roll call, the answer came into sharp relief. Firestone stepped up to one of them and asked when she might be reunited with her mother and father.
The guard pointed up to the chimneys.
“‘There go your parents,' she said.”
The new arrivals began looking to the veteran prisoners for some interpretation of the guard's comment.
“They told us, ‘You're not in Germany. You're in Auschwitz-Birkenau,'” Firestone said. “‘Nobody leaves this place except through the chimney.'”
For the next 13 months, life at Auschwitz continued that way — beatings, starvation, death at the hands of the guards or the gas chambers or the elements or the deprivation. Once a day, the prisoners were given a watery swill called “ersatz” (the word means “substitute” or “imitation”), having a taste something akin to coffee, Firestone said. Along with that came a single slice of usually fetid bread.
The guards conducted roll calls at 4 a.m. and 3 p.m. In between, prisoners could not seek shelter inside the rows and rows of barracks.
“That was our daily routine,” Firestone said. “We were outside all day. Whether it was 115 degrees in the summer or 40-below in the winter.”
One day, Firestone caught sight of her father. Though overjoyed just to catch a glimpse of him, she was equally concerned about what the effect might be on her father.
“My heart almost stopped,” she said. “I didn't want him to see me because how is he going to feel seeing me after the way I felt when I saw him?”
Firestone tried to duck behind a group of people to hide, but her eyes were suddenly met by her father's gaze.
“And I saw his tears,” she said. “These are just little memories that, when I stop to talk about them, it brings back the whole scene.”
About six months into their internment Mengele reinserted himself into Firestone's and her sister's life, taking the sister away to the dreaded building where he carried out inconceivably ghastly experiments on human subjects.
It was not until 1997 that Firestone learned of her sister's fate when she returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of the filming of “The Last Days,” to look at the camp's archives. There she discovered that her sister had been experimented upon.
The archivist at Auschwitz told Firestone that one of the doctors at Mengele's “Hygenic Institute,” Dr. Hans Munch, was still alive and living in Munich.
Firestone decided to confront him and ask what exactly happened to her sister.
Munch said that only harmless experiments had been carried out on Firestone's sister.
“I asked him, ‘Then why did she have to die?'” Firestone said. “And he had the audacity to say to me: ‘We couldn't let her go back to the camps to tell everyone what we were doing. We had to get rid of her, so she was shot.'”
As Soviet forces closed in on Auschwitz in the spring of 1945, Firestone and other Auschwitz inmates were led on a grueling forced march to a camp inside Germany, where they were put to work in a factory. The Red Army eventually liberated the camp on May 8, 1945 — the very day victory in Europe was declared.
For three months after being liberated, Firestone roamed Eastern Europe with other survivors and refugees. She found her brother, who had fled to Slovakia and fought the Germans with a partisan wing of the Soviet forces.
The two heard that their father was alive and had been transported towards the end of the war to another notorious concentration camp at Theresienstadt. In the hospital set up to nurse the camp's survivors, Firestone and her brother did indeed find him.
“We walked through the hospital and could not see him anywhere,” she remembered. “And then, as we're leaving, this skeleton sits up in bed and says, ‘Frank,' my brother's name. It was our father. He died four months later, but at least he died knowing that two of his children had survived.”
As Firestone wrapped up her story, students peppered her with questions, including one on which she'd earlier offered some insight: What can we learn from the Holocaust?
“Humanity has learned absolutely nothing from the Holocaust,” she told the students. “That's why I'm sitting here talking to you. We learned absolutely nothing. I spent a lot of time thinking while I was at Auschwitz that God equipped man with a brain, a heart and free will, and it's up to us to learn how to live. But in the Holocaust, humanity stood still while it happened. I envisioned God up there watching and saying, ‘Where did I go wrong with men?'”
After Firestone's presentation, visibly moved and awed students encircled her and received warm embraces from the 87-year-old.
They also reflected on the lessons they'd take from hearing a first-hand recounting of the atrocities at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“I thought it was really amazing,” said eighth-grader Rose Sycuro. “I can't even begin to imagine how hard it must have been to live through that. We've read about the Holocaust in books, but this brought it to a whole new level of reality.”
Nick Spencers agreed.
“There are not many Holocaust survivors left, so it was cool that she could share her story with us,” he said. “Books can say a lot about it and teach us, but this gave us a picture of the depth of it.”
Spencers also said he was moved by what Firestone had said about humanity's inability to take a lesson from the Holocaust, given the repetition of genocide in such places as Cambodia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Sudan.
“It doesn't seem possible to me that we'll ever completely stop it,” he said. “It just seems it only takes one odd person out there to start it all over again. It's sad, but that seems to be the case.”
After her presentation, Firestone had a ready answer for Spencers and his generation.
“We who survived the Holocaust were hoping that we would never see another genocide like that, ever again,” she reflected as she surveyed the students around her who were engaged in avid conversations. “There's no rhyme or reason why I survived — why it was me and not some other who made it. Maybe this is the reason. I feel a responsibility to the other six million. I get tons of letters from kids and it's clear they understand the stakes. Maybe that is what this is all about that finally, some of them might be able to really think about this and make the world a better place.”
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