Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 31, 2015, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A6 A 6 WINNIPEG FREE PRESS, SATURDAY, JANUARY 31, 2015 SATURDAY SPECIAL winnipegfreepress. com M ORRIS Faintuch is sitting in the darkness at the kitchen table, his face lit by candle light and a smile. A power outage that hit West Kildonan earlier this week didn't spare his bungalow on Matheson Avenue. And like all Winnipeggers that night, Faintuch was facing a boil- water advisory, too. Could be worse. In fact, he can show you: The now indecipherable tattoo on his left forearm that once read: " B1333," which he holds next to the flickering light. " This was my name," Faintuch said. The B stands for Birkenau, the Auschwitz " Death Factory" where Faintuch, a Polish Jew, was imprisoned by Germans during the Second World War. Faintuch is 87 now, and it has been 70 years since he was dressed in prison garb, scrounging for food and surviving the sudden death that on one occasion literally almost smothered him. So a night with no lights and boiling water? Meh. " What I saw was unreal," said Faintuch, born in the Polish city of Rodon in 1928. " Some people think I'm making up stories. I don't tell you everything. There's lots of stuff. I saw people beaten, hanged, shot." It was in Birkenau that Faintuch saw the Angel of Death, Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, in his long, leather SS coat. It was in Birkenau that Faintuch, who spent a childhood flirting with execution, once snuck a quick peek at the gas chambers while German soldiers guarding him stepped out for a smoke. Precious few Jews of Polish descent can say they saw both, and lived. Said Faintuch: " Usually when you go in ( to the gas chamber), it's goodbye, Charlie." More than six million Jews were killed under Hitler's master plan of Endlosung, the Final Solution. Nearly half were Polish, and the vast majority of them were gassed, cremated or buried in concentration camps such as Auschwitz, the most prolific and infamous. The 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was marked this week on Jan. 27. It is a symbolic date for survivors like Faintuch, who are rare in number. His personal liberation date was May 4, 1945, when American soldiers arrived at a concentration camp in Austria, where Faintuch and fellow prisoners had been marched as the Germans began to flee advancing Allied troops. Jeremy Maron, researcher/ curator at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights - who focuses on both the Holocaust and Mass Extinction exhibits - said an estimated one million Jews were executed at Birkenau, around 900,000 of them Poles. With an atrocity on such a massive scale, Maron said, all the more important to heed the survivors who remain. " It's easy to lose the individual behind the six million," he said. " Days like this one ( Jan. 27) give us a moment to pause and think back," Maron added. " And as long as there are people with a living memory of this history, it's important to give them their voice. Educate us and help us remember, especially since this was a voice the Nazis tried to silence. Allow them to regain the dignity that was stolen from them." Belle Jarniewski, chairwoman of the Freeman Family Holocaust Education Centre in Winnipeg, said the anniversary should not just be confined to Auschwitz, but also the other death camps and ghettos where Jews perished from either disease, starvation or execution. " This story belongs not just to our particular history but to all humanity," said Jarniewski, who produced the book Voices of Winnipeg Holocaust Survivors , a compilation of memories written by local survivors and their family members. " The perpetrators were human beings. The victims were human beings. The survivors are human beings. And people continue to suffer. The effects are so overwhelming." Jarniewski's father was the only one in his entire family to survive - and that included his pregnant first wife. On Jarniewski's maternal side - her parents later met and married in Canada - only her mother and an aunt survived. Most perished in concentration camps at Treblinka, Dachau and Auschwitz. Jarniewski often looks at photos of her grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins taken prior to the war. And wonders. " When most people think about genocide they think about the immediate numbers that were murdered," she said. " But we really don't think about the exponential effect. All of the families that could have been. And all of their descendants that simply will never be, and what they could have been. Imagine what they could have contributed to society, and for generations to come." " We need to educate," Jarniewski added. " We need to ensure people remember this atrocity that occurred. We need to remember the survivors and those who had the courage to stand up and say, ' No.' Perhaps if we study history we won't continue to repeat it." How Faintuch defied the odds and lived, he really can't tell you. " It's a miracle I survived," he shrugged. " Without parents, what did I know? God helped me." Like the time when he was in a work camp prior to arriving in Auschwitz, when he was in the front row of a group of prisoners who looked up to see a machine- gun in the back of a Nazi truck. Faintuch was not sure what happened next. He fell or fainted. By the time he awoke, he was covered in the bodies of the dead, his clothes soaked in their blood. Faintuch survived the infamous Lodz Ghetto as a 12- year- old boy who snuck into the city to buy goods to resell to fellow captives. He survived as a child, after losing his father in 1941 ( arrested and never returned) and his mother to typhus in 1942. For two years, Faintuch moved from work camp to work camp before finally being herded into a train boxcar bound for Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. He was 16, able to work, and it probably didn't hurt he had blond hair and blue eyes, he said. He was resourceful, scavenging for cigarette butts dropped by German soldiers, which he would trade to fellow prisoners for scraps of bread. In January 1945, Faintuch and the remaining prisoners were rounded up by Germans and marched out of Auschwitz, only days before the Russian soldiers arrived. Three months later, in April, they were liberated from a work camp in Austria by American troops. Faintuch was moved to Israel, then in 1952 set off for a place called Winnipeg - where his grandparents, who had emigrated prior to the Second World War, had settled. One of Faintuch's two surviving brothers, a doctor named Henry, also lived in Winnipeg. In 1956, Faintuch took a wife, Mildred, and they raised two daughters and a son. The boy who had survived trading cigarettes for food and smuggling goods in the ghetto then opened up a grocery store on Logan Avenue that he ran for almost 30 years. Even now, a lifetime later, the images Faintuch witnessed as a young man still return. " Most of the time I dream about it," he said. " And when the dreams come, goodbye night. Because I can't sleep anymore." But in the words of Maron, Faintuch's voice was never silenced. He has told his story hundreds of times to school groups and news organizations. On two occasions, he even returned to Auschwitz. " That's my job," he said. " As long as I live - and I'm not a young man now - I'll do what I can. It's important that people should know the truth." randy. turner@ freepress. mb. ca ' AS LONG AS I LIVE... I'LL DO WHAT I CAN' Survivor makes it his mission to tell the horrors of Auschwitz Staring death in the eye Never forgotten For the 70th anniversary commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz, the Holocaust Education Centre of the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada in Winnipeg organized a multi- faceted program that included: . North American premi�re of the documentary film Wielka Szpera ( The Great Szpera ) on Jan. 25, with Polish director Piotr Weychert present. . A three- week exhibit of The Face of the Ghetto - Pictures Taken in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto 1940- 1944 , which will be shown at the Ogniwo Polish Museum until Feb. 13. . A community lecture with Dr. Thomas Lutz, the curator of The Face of the Ghetto and senior consultant with the Topography of Terror museum in Berlin, on Feb. 11, beginning at 7 p. m. at the Berney Theatre. Dr. Lutz will be speaking about the making of the exhibit and its narrative as well as the history of the Lodz Ghetto. By Randy Turner PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Morris Faintuch's tattoo - B1333 - has faded. The memories of Auschwitz have not. Morris as a young boy with his brother, Henry, and sister- in- law. is ng th r, nd w. A_ 06_ Jan- 31- 15_ FP_ 01. indd A6 1/ 30/ 15 10: 18: 43 PM ;