Survivor recounts horrors of Holocaust during commemoration event in Vaughan

Yorkregion.com
April 28, 2014
By Chris Simon

When Leslie Meisels entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, he weighed a robust 175 pounds.

Four months later, he was down to an emaciated 75.

The Thornhill resident, now 87, recounted his story of survival during the Second World War, as part of the Jews on the Edge 1944: Between Annihilation and Liberation Yom Hashoah V’Hagvurah community Holocaust commemoration, which took place Sunday at the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Jewish Community Campus.

"Bergen-Belsen did not have gas chambers, but it became one of the cruelest of the concentration camps," he said, peeking up from his speech to address the crowd of onlookers in the packed Lebovic gymnasium. "To die there was easy. (Staying) alive was hard. This was the result of government sponsored hatred and the silence of the majority. Everybody must remember."

There was also a presentation of photographs from Israel’s official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem’s Auschwitz Album, along with a candle lighting service to honour all victims of Nazi persecution, such as homosexuals, disabled people and those with differing political and religious ideologies.

"We are fortunate to live in a wonderful country of such diverse cultures and religions with such high level tolerance for such diversity," Louis Greenbaum, one of the event organizers, said. "Yet ignorance still exists regarding the horrors of the Holocaust, both here and abroad. There is a rising movement of anti-semitism around the world."

To reduce hatred, greater education on the history of the Holocaust - the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of about six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators - is necessary in countries across the globe, he said.

Mr. Meisels was born in Hungary in 1927. He lived in the ghettos of Nadudvar and Debrecen, as well as a forced labour camp in Austria.

His family was included in the 20,000 "exchange Jews", where lives were bartered for gold, diamonds and cash in a secret deal between Rudolph Kastner and Adolf Eichmann.

As Kastner Jews, they were sent to Bergen-Belsen, where they stayed together and were treated somewhat better than other prisoners. In April 1945, the family was liberated by the American army.

"We live in a time when the Holocaust is passing from living memory into history," Israel's consul general to Toronto, D.J. Schneeweiss, said. "Seventy years ago, the Jews of Europe stood on the edge between horror and hope, many aware of the horrors of the camps, yet aware, too, of the tantalizing possibility they might be spared. Thankfully, today, our people are free of the cruelty."