Holocaust survivor tells the worst of 100 years

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Ely Litsky blows kisses to the friends and family that came to help celebrate his 100th birthday Sunday, 65 years after the Nazis tried to kill him at Auschwitz.MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

VIDEO: Holocaust survivor's 100th birthday


Ely Litsky remembers.

He remembers the night the Nazis ordered him into the street, hands on his head. He remembers the train ride, the cold of the concentration camps, the day he lost five toes after a forced march through waist-deep snow.

He remembers the date – Feb. 7, 1943 – when he last saw his wife and son on the train platform at Auschwitz.

Litsky celebrated his 100th birthday on Sunday with friends and prayers and gifts of his favorite Scotch. He is among the last of a dying generation, a Holocaust survivor who was already an adult with a home and a family when the Nazis stormed into his town.

He remembers the days that followed, when living to see the next morning, much less his 100th birthday, seemed impossible.

Ely is a small man, with wispy white hair and watery, blue-gray eyes. He doesn't hear well in his right ear, where a German guard once clubbed him. His voice is gravelly with age and thick with the accent of his native Poland.

He worked as a waiter before the war, in a kosher restaurant in the town of Bialystok. He was there one evening when a band was playing and people were dancing, and he spotted a young woman with dark eyes and blonde hair. "Just a beauty," he says.

Her name was Rachel. They married and made a home in the Jewish ghetto of Bialystok, behind wires and fences, where 15 people often crowded into a single bedroom. They had a baby, a little boy with his mother's blonde hair and his grandfather's first name, Israel.

It was bitterly cold on the evening in February 1943 when the Nazis came through the ghetto, shooting and ordering everyone into the streets — and then into the train cars. Ely sat with his wife and 18-month-old son for two days as their train rumbled toward the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

As it slowed, he told Rachel to try to hide their son on the train. "I am a mother, and you are a father," she told him. "I'll hold my baby to the last second."

The train doors opened, and Ely saw guards pushing old men and women to the right, young men to the left. He held tight to Rachel's arm as she cradled Israel.

A guard grabbed Ely and tried to pull him away, then clubbed him in the head and back, knocking him to the ground. The guard kicked him in the back, shouting "Get up! Get up!" Ely struggled to his feet and searched the crowd.

Rachel and Israel were gone.

More than 2,000 people arrived at Auschwitz that day from the Bialystok ghetto, historian Martin Gilbert wrote in his history of the Holocaust. Only 123 of them were sent to the barracks, all men. The rest were sent to the gas chambers.

"My wife and my son," Ely says now, and then his voice breaks. "They took from me."

They took his name next, replacing it with a number: 100719, tattooed in dull blue ink on his left forearm, just below his elbow. They put him to work carrying heavy loads of bricks, dawn to dusk, every day. If he dropped a brick, they beat him. If he couldn't work, they'd shoot him.

He withered to 70 pounds on the camp diet of thin barley soup, half his normal weight. Once, he managed to get his hands on some Italian bread and salami, but a guard caught him. They whipped him 25 times across his backside and threw him into the notorious prison known to camp inmates as the Death Block. He spent three weeks there, alone in a tiny stone cell.

He was working inside Auschwitz on a January day in 1945 when an alarm sounded and guards began rounding up prisoners. The Russian Army was closing in. The guards gave every prisoner a piece of bread and a blanket, and then ordered them to start running.

They ran through the night, slipping and stumbling through the snow; those who fell back were shot through the head. At a railroad, the Nazis loaded them into frigid open-air cars and sent them into the mountains, to the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Ely had stopped feeling the sting of the cold in his right toes by the time they reached the camp. A fellow prisoner, once a doctor, told him he would lose his leg to gangrene if his toes weren't amputated. The man sharpened a table knife on a brick and severed each of Ely's right toes, then wrapped his foot in a dead man's shirt to stop the bleeding.

The death march to Mauthausen had bought the Germans only a few months. A division of the U.S. Third Army reached the camp on a sunny day in early May 1945. A soldier who was there would later remember smelling the death in the air as they approached.

Afterward, Ely made his way back to his hometown of Bialystok, hoping to reunite with his wife or sisters there. He found the town in ruins, the restaurant where he once worked destroyed.

"Nobody came," he says now. "Everybody, the Germans killed.

"I was alone."

It's been 65 years since Nazi Germany tried to kill Ely Litsky. In time, he moved to the Bronx, and then to a care home in Santa Ana. He met another young beauty at another dance in the late 1940s, and they had a daughter. He became a die-hard Yankees fan.

He has almost surely outlived the guards who beat and starved him. And on Sunday, surrounded by nearly 200 friends and fans, he danced and sang and blew kisses at his birthday party at the Chabad of Irvine.

"I'm so happy now," he told the crowd. And then he offered a prayer in Yiddish: "In kumendik yahr mir zulin tzurik kumen tzuzamen."

"May we all come together again next year."

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