Speaker Describes Holocaust Experience

— Max Herzel, an Orthodox Jew from Belgium, spent part of his teenage years masquerading as a Catholic shepherd in the French Alps.

Herzel was trying to avoid what happened to members of his family during World War II — they were sent to a concentration camp and died during the Holocaust.

Herzel was the featured speaker Friday at the 21st Annual Holocaust Education Day at the Mount Sequoyah Conference Center. Students from Fayetteville, Springdale and other area schools attended.

Herzel, who lives in Alabama, said he wanted to preserve testimony and evidence of the Holocaust for future generations.

“I’m retired now and this is my mission in life,” Herzel said. “I want to memorialize my friends and relatives who died during the Holocaust.”

Herzel said he grew up in Antwerp, Belgium, a member of a large extended family that worked hard to make ends meet. His life was torn apart, he said, on the day in May 1940 when Germany invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. He said he could see airplane dogfights, bombs falling and strafing of the city from the windows of his apartment.

Not wanting to travel during the Jewish Sabbath, Herzel’s family boarded a train for a 35-minute ride to Brussels, the capital of the country.

“We were bombed and strafed,” Herzel said. “It took hours.”

After arriving in Brussels, the family decided to keep going. They fled to France, becoming one of many refugees.

“France was full of Spanish, Dutch and Belgian refugees,” Herzel said. “There was no way the French government could handle them.”

The family was sent to one interment camp, then another. After several winter months in freezing conditions, a group, including Herzel’s family, escaped after bribing the guards, he said.

Their path led further south into the section of France controlled, not by German Nazis, but by collaborating Frenchmen. The family reached Marseilles, then moved to a small village. Herzel’s father, Oscar, and older brother, Harry, were sent to a work camp. His mother, Naomi, tried to commit suicide by jumping into a river, Herzel said.

Naomi Herzel spent the rest of the war in a psychiatric hospital, Herzel said, protected by a doctor. Max Herzel was sent to an orphanage.

Soon, the French government received more pressure to give up Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other “undesirables,” Herzel said. Jewish girls in the orphanage were hidden in convents, he said. Herzel became a French orphan, named Max Herve, who was sent to a farm where he worked as a shepherd taking care of sheep, goats and mules.

Finally, American tanks came crawling up the valley were Herzel lived, freeing the area.

After the war, Herzel found his mother and older brother. The brother escaped from the work camp and joined resistance fighters.

Oscar Herzel was not as lucky. He also escaped, but was arrested in Italy and sent to Auschwitz, a concentration camp. As Russian forces neared the camp, Oscar Herzel became part of what was a death march to the Buchenwald concentration camp. The march began with 60,000 prisoners and concluded with 15,000.

Oscar Herzel died in Buchenwald of dysentery, heart failure and malnutrition, Max Herzel said.

Both of Max Herzel’s uncles from Antwerp died in the Holocaust, as did several of their children. Other aunts and uncles living in Poland, disappeared during days of mass murders, Herzel said. The disappearance came when Jews and others were forced to dig large pits, then were machine-gunned to death.

Herzel came to the United States, married and raised two children, he said.

“I forget what I had for breakfast yesterday, but the memories of the Holocaust are as vivid as ever,” Herzel said.

Jonmark Harris, a student at Haas Hall Academy, said he learned about the Holocaust in classes.

“Hearing an account by someone who had been there makes it so much clearer,” Harris said.

Herzel said revisionists try to deny the Holocaust happened.

“It’s sad when someone tries to deny it happened, when people like Mr. Herzel who survived are still alive,” said Shelby Freitas, another Haas Hall student. “It meant a lot to me to hear what happened to him.”

At A Glance

The Holocaust

Since 1945, the word Holocaust has taken on a new and horrible meaning: The mass murder of some 6 million European Jews (as well as members of some other persecuted groups, such as Gypsies and homosexuals) by the German Nazi regime during the Second World War. To the anti-Semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat to German racial purity and community. After years of Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were consistently persecuted, Hitler’s “final solution” came to fruition under the cover of world war, with mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps mainly in occupied Poland.

Source: The History Channel Website

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