Forgiveness triumphs over hatred

Alter Wiener recalls his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp during a Tigard all-school assembly

By Geoff Pursinger

The Times, Jan 21, 2010, Updated Jan 22, 2010

Holocaust survivor Alter Wiener speaks at Tigard High School’s annual Human Rights Assembly, Jan. 11.

Jaime Valdez / Times Newspapers

Wiener ’s story

In 1939, Wiener (pronounced vee-ner) and his family fled Poland for a time as Germany invaded. Wiener’s father, a shopkeeper, was forced to stay behind. When the family returned later, the family found their apartment looted and their father missing. He was later identified as one of 37 residents shot by German forces and thrown into a shallow grave. He was identified by a piece of clothing, and had been dead for three months.

Wiener gave his father, and the rest of the bodies, a proper burial. Wiener was 13 years old.

In 1942, Wiener was taken from his family. He remembers a German soldier slapping his stepmother when she begged them not to take him.

Wiener was loaded onto a cattle car with 80 other people. With nothing to eat or drink for a day and a half, one person died standing up. They were taken to the Blechhammer labor camp, where he was reunited with his brother, who he hadn’t seen in a year.

“I didn’t even recognize him,” Wiener said. “In one year, he aged 10 years.”

Wiener shared a cramped 8-by-10 foot room with 17 people, sleeping on beds made of straw and riddled with insects. His diet consisted of sawdust sandwiches.

“For most people it would he uneatable,” he said. “But we had nothing else.”

At one point, Wiener traded his watch for a loaf of bread. When a camp commander found out, Wiener was whipped 15 times. He never received the bread.

Wiener was later moved to Brande work camp and never saw his brother again. He found out later that his brother had been put into a gas chamber and murdered.

“The commander (at Brande) was a tyrant – he enjoyed torturing us,” he said. One day he forced Wiener and other inmates to stand all night in an ice-cold shower.

At Wiener’s third labor camp, Gross Masselwitz, he met a mysterious German woman who hid a sandwich for him underneath a crate.

“It was illegal for Germans to even make eye contact with prisoners,” Wiener said. She hid a sandwich for Wiener every day for 30 days.

He never learned the woman’s name, or her motivation for helping him, but he said it taught him a valuable lesson. “There are good and bad people in every group,” he said.

Wiener was then moved to a fourth camp, Kletendorf, and then eventually to Waldenburg. Upon arrival, Wiener received the number 64735.

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