Staff Writer
As a rule when the Caribou Performing Arts Center is filled with mostly high school and middle school students, there is a lot of chatter and rustling to be heard. Even during specific programs, it is rare that silence overcomes the theatre, however on April 15, the preverbal “pin” would have sounded like cymbals crashing.
Aroostook Republican photo/Barb Scott
Max Slabotzy, a survivor of the Holocaust, responds to a question prepared by Caribou High School students, following his presentation to CHS and CMS students, during which he re-told the story of his imprisonment as a child in the Auschwitz Death Camp and the Brobeck and Goleszow labor Camps.
The event you ask? — a movie premiere? — a famous author, a rock star? No, the students filling most every seat in the house were captured by the words of Max Slabotzy, a survivor of the Holocaust from Ixelles, Belgium.
Born in 1931 in Belgium, Slabotzy learned at the tender age of 8, in 1939, just how quickly one’s world can be turned upside down.
Relating his story to his young audience, Slabotzy told of how he and his family found themselves walking from night until dawn looking for a place to cross the border during the time when Jewish people were being questioned and retained. At one point the white-haired gentleman spoke of how, after walking throughout the night they found themselves back to where they had started.
Slabotzy recalled the regulations that he and his family were faced with — only being able to shop in certain stores, the 7 p.m. curfews, drawn shades, children being forbidden to attend school and required to wear the Jewish star symbol.
As he continued to tell his story, humor was interjected, used as a cushion, admittedly by the storyteller himself, to help get through the memories his words created. Re-telling the heartbreaking and amazing story of how he ended up in a mansion (refuge found for him by a neighbor) being relegated to a room where he stayed for three months constantly being told to stay inside. On the fateful day, the child decided, “Nobody will know if I go to get an ice cream.” His love of ice cream brought him face to face with soldiers.
“Are you a Jew,” the child was asked, “No,” he said, then remembered the star on his shirt. Slabotzy then said, “I say, ‘Yes I am.’” With that reply the soldiers took him to the back of a truck, which once under way kept stopping and picking up Jewish individuals. As Slabotzy spoke about his capture he described his imprisonment at the Auschwitz Death Camp, the Brobeck and Goleszow labor camps.
Once the truck reached it’s destination, he was placed in a room and asked questions, “I just said, ‘I don’t know,’ when they asked about my family members. We were all taken down into the basement of this building and I saw many suitcases — the people were then moved to the prison , papers were signed and were they were directed where to be.”
One man who worked in the prison kitchen told the soldiers he knew Max’s father and he found himself working for four month in the kitchen. “More and more Jewish people were coming and one day we were all called downstairs and given clothes.”
The young boy, along with the rest of the detainees were put in train cars, 50 to 55 in each car and traveled for three or four days with limited food and water, no bathroom and only two tiny windows at the top of the railcars. “Every time a plane flew over the train stopped,” said the survivor,” and then we reached Auschwitz.”
“There was an elder man asleep next to me in the car and when we stopped I said, ‘It’s time to get up,’ ‘he’s dead,’ said another man — that was the first time I had ever seen a dead person.” From here, his story took his captive audience down the path of the Jewish no longer being in need of the numbers that had previously been assigned to them. As they disembarked the rail cars, soldiers stood in front of them, directing women and girls to the left, men and boys to assemble in the middle and to the right the older men and the very young boys.
“There was a hole in the ground that was three times the size of this building, “ said Slabotzy, “it was then I saw all the clothing and suitcases piled and we were instructed to remove our clothes from the waist up, our heads shaved (we were told it was because there was no soap) and given shower items and a striped uniform. We were then taken to the showers and sprayed down with DDT, told to get dressed then follow the soldiers to the enbankment and to go to sleep.”
“I couldn’t sleep, my head was going 200mph, I was tired and hungry. At 4:30 a.m. we were awakened, told to move and were counted — we were on the Poland/German border and it was very cold. I still remember how the meal of soup and bread we were given tasted.”
During this three-month time, Slabotzy recalled seeing masses of food, diamonds, gold and currency from all over the world and most of all — more people coming into the encampment. The next camp the survivor experienced for 2 and one-half months was where his job was to clean the irrigation pipe and the next where he spent one month sanding wood.
Aroostook Republican photo/Barb Scott
Kenneth Atcheson, head of the Caribou High School Social Studies Department, speaks with Max Slabotzy, Holocaust survivor a recent guest speaker at the high school. Slabotzy spoke to area students about his personal experiences in labor camps and his liberation.
One day while in the prison barracks there came a noise and he thought it was the soldiers coming for them — instead they were liberated by elements of the Soviet Army, and later cared for by American soldiers. “We were given food and two individuals died as a result of eating too much, too soon,” he said.
Slabotzy spoke of how he discovered his mother in a hospital only to have her pass away seven days after she moved in with him. “She refused to speak about what had been done to her,“ said Slabotzy, “but she was always a very small woman and even though her face looked the same, her body was bruised and was five times its normal size. She had been in the prison camp for two and one-half years — one of many victims of dr. Joseph Mengele’s (The Angel of Death at Auschwitz-Birkenau) experiments.”
When Slabotzy finished his story, (although it was time that had expired, not the details) a question-and- answer period was provided with the distinguished speaking replying again with sincerity, dignity and honesty.
Asked what his worst memory of his experience was, Slabotzy replied, “Every day of it.”
“Indifference fuels the energy,” stated the 79-year-old Holocaust speaker, “my greatest hope is that this never happens again.”
The Social Studies Department at Caribou High School hosted Slabotzy, as well as a another guest speaker Charles Rotmil, who was a child when his mother was killed in a train wreck caused by an attack of the Nazi Lutwaffe, and who was hidden and saved from death by a Roman Catholic priest.
