When a Nazi guard slid open the door of the boxcar that carried Jack Welner and his family to Auschwitz, “it was like the gates of hell opened up,” Welner said Sunday.
Screams and shots echoed as Nazi SS men picked out those who would be sent to gas chambers because they were too weak to work.
Welner’s mother handed him a small piece of bread as they were separated. “My mother pushed it into my hand and said, ‘you take it, I won’t need it,’ ” he said.
Welner, who is now 94, told his story Sunday at the Hebrew Educational Alliance’s Holocaust commemoration and celebration of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.
A handful of other survivors, all of whom now live in Colorado, along with a 90-year-old veteran who helped to liberate Ohrdruf, a concentration camp in Germany, shared their stories.
Welner went on to survive at two other concentration camps, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. The Germans fed their prisoners, who provided slave labor, a starvation diet of 100 to 150 calories a day.
“The Germans turned us into zombies … where the only thing on your mind was food,” he said.
Leon Tulper, who was with Gen. George Patton’s Third Army, was in the unit that liberated Ohrdruf.
He and his infantry unit were driving south after a firefight with German soldiers when they spotted the camp. “We didn’t know it was a concentration camp,” he said.
They passed a row of large ovens, then bins filled with clothing and, finally, bins holding bones before reaching a large barracks. Survivors of the horror began walking and stumbling from the barracks. On that day, Tulper said, he witnessed skeletons walking, and his life changed.
Starving people held out their hands for food. But the soldiers were moving ahead of their supply line, and had nothing to give them.
“Guys were crying. None of us could believe what transpired there,” Tulper said.
Oscar Sladek, 80, who was born in Slovakia, survived the Holocaust without spending time in a camp.
For a time, he and his parents hid with other Jews in a cabin in a mountainous area. On Christmas Day 1944, the Germans found the cabin, and Sladek and his family hid in a cave.
The Nazis burned the cabin down and sent others who had lived there to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Before a partisan who was resisting the Germans found them, “we almost starved,” Sladek remembered.
They were saved when the partisans took them to a Russian army unit, he said.
Twenty-two members of his extended family died. “I was the only child under the age of 15 that survived,” he said.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671, tmcghee@denverpost.com or twitter.com/dpmcghee
