Joseph Alexander, who just turned 100, travels to schools and museums across the state recalling his experiences of surviving the Holocaust. He’s even been immortalized in Steven Spielberg’s 1996 documentary, “Survivors of The Holocaust.”
The Los Angeles resident recently spoke in front of a crowd of over 200, at Newport Beach’s Chabad Center for Jewish Life, detailing the atrocities of his birthplace—Poland—being invaded in 1939 by the Nazis, his time in concentration camps, being sent to Auschwitz, and ultimately being saved by U.S. troops a day before his scheduled execution.
“I still don’t know if anyone in my family survived. As far as I know, I am the only one,” Alexander said.
Alexander’s talk was held Jan. 27 in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
During the nearly two-hour talk, Alexander said he, at 17, was separated from his family after their attempted escape when Hitler invaded, and was ultimately sent to 12 concentration camps before his liberation in 1945.
He said he was also sent to multiple ghettos just outside Warsaw. Conditions at some were so bad, Alexander said, people were sometimes found dead on the sidewalk each morning from suicide, sickness, starvation, and even from being shot by Nazi officers.
He said he contracted typhus during this time, opting to hide behind an outdoor trash can, instead of spreading the disease in work camps, for three days as he recovered from his fever.
“Life [in the ghetto] was more miserable than you can imagine,” he said.
Shortly after, he said he was relocated to a camp facing hard manual field labor with scarce food—a palm-sized piece of bread and a bowl of potato skin soup per day.
He said he avoided starvation, by making deals with civilians for extra food and stayed hydrated—while working in the marshes at one of the camps—by ringing out water from the bottom of his muddy shirt to drink.
Ultimately, he said, he was loaded on a train to Auschwitz.
He told the audience prisoners had no water or facilities during the three-day trip, and approximately 40 percent died en route.
Arriving at Auschwitz, Alexander said he was faced with the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, known now by historians as “The Angel of Death” for his role in choosing which prisoners lived and died, along with his horrific medical experiments on prisoners.
According to Alexander, Mengele placed him in the line headed for the gas chamber due to his small size. As Mengele walked away, however, Alexander said he quickly switched to the labor line.
“If it wasn’t midnight I would not have gotten away [with] sneaking into the other line, and I would not be speaking to you today,” he told the crowd.
There, his arm was tattooed with his prisoner number 142584, which he held up for all to see.
Six years later, April of 1945, Alexander said he was sharing a wooden shelf bed with two other men—this time, at the Dachau death camp—when he and his fellow inmates were sentenced to a three-day death march, to a location where they were told they would be executed in the German mountains.
On the second day of their trek, however, their Nazi captors suddenly vanished, Alexander said. By that point, he said he recalled hearing American planes nearby.
Alexander said he and the others eventually made it to a nearby village outside of Munich, and were freed by American troops April 29, 1945, when Germany surrendered in the war.
He said he spent the next five years scouring Germany for anyone in his family who may have survived.
He found none, he said, but learned his younger brother was executed in a gas chamber at the age of 12.
As audience members took in Alexander’s story, many were moved to tears. Many were descendants of parents and grandparents who had also survived the Holocaust.
“I just can’t fathom how someone can go through all that and still be as happy as [Alexander] is,” Jane Friedman told The Epoch Times. “He’s seriously amazing.”
During the question and answer portion of the program, one audience member asked what Alexander would say to his family if he had the chance to speak with them.
His answer evoked the largest applause of the night.
“I would be very happy ... if I could speak to one member of my family,” he said. “I would be very happy. But unfortunately, I can’t. I have to speak for them. Not just for them. I need to speak for 6 million Jews because they can’t talk.”
