Holocaust survivor shares experiences

By MARY ANN ALBRIGHT
Gazette-Times reporter

The only physical reminder Jack Terry has of the Holocaust is a faint dot of ink on the inside of his left wrist, the last remnant of an old “KL” tattoo that identified him as a prisoner of a “koncentration lager,” or concentration camp, during World War II.

The psychological and emotional scars, however, haven’t disappeared.

His father, mother and siblings were all killed by the Nazis. Today, when Terry, now 76, thinks about the final communication he received from his sister, his eyes well up with tears.

Her note to Terry, smuggled to him by another prisoner, read, “I know what has happened. My only wish is to see you again.”

Terry traveled from his New York home to Corvallis as part of Oregon State University’s Holocaust Memorial Week. On Wednesday evening, he delivered a talk, “To Live Again: Memories of Destruction and Renewal.”

Terry, whose given name is Jakub Szabmacher, was born to a Jewish family in Belzyce, Poland, in 1930.

He described the Nazi control over Jews as “an insidious yet rapidly progressing process.”

When World War II began, he’d completed three years of school, the most Jews were allowed. His family was forced into a ghetto, and made to wear arm bands bearing the Star of David.

May 8, 1943, is a date burned into Terry’s memory. That was the day his mother and sister were murdered, and he was taken to Budzyn, a Nazi concentration camp.

At Budzyn, Terry was put to work in a Nazi airplane factory. One of his most chilling memories at that camp is being forced to beat another prisoner who had tried to hide a small reminder of his slain wife in a soup bowl.

“In effect, what (the Nazis) were doing was involving us in the murder,” Terry said.

As the Russian front worked its way west, Terry and about 3,000 other prisoners were shipped in boxcars to Wieliczka, another Nazi camp.

When the Jews arrived, Amon Goeth, the German officer portrayed in the film “Schindler’s List,” separated them into two groups.

On the right, he put the old, small and disabled. On the left, he gathered people who looked like they could work. Goeth told Terry to go to the right.

“I had an out-of-body-experience and walked to the left, fully expecting to be shot. But somehow I made it,” Terry said.

While in Wieliczka, Terry worked on airplanes in an excavated salt mine.

“We went down before sunrise, and came back up after sunset,” he recalled.

In late-July 1944, as the Russians moved farther west, Terry was transferred to another camp.

On his way to Flossenburg, a Bavarian facility, Terry rode for four days in a cramped boxcar with 100 other prisoners. They had no food, water or fresh air, and were forced to share one pail as a toilet.

Flossenburg was known for its “Extermination Through Work” program, and Terry said he wouldn’t have survived if he hadn’t been able to get out of the rock quarry and find a job in another airplane factory.

On April 15, 1945, a Czech prisoner told him not to return to his barrack when the curfew whistle sounded at 9 p.m. Instead, Terry was instructed to come to the boiler room.

That night, he hid in a tunnel full of pipes that stretched from the laundry facilities to the kitchen. The next morning, while he lie hidden, he heard the other prisoners being sent on a death march.

When he came out of hiding, he was the only Jew left in the camp. That same Czech man arranged for Terry to be concealed in the typhus ward of the camp hospital until the American troops arrived at Flossenburg on April 23.

“The camp was liberated, but we as human beings were not. That was the saddest day of my life,” Terry recalled. “For the first time, I thought about something other than putting food in my mouth. I realized I’m 15 years old, and I have nobody. I belong to nobody. Nobody belongs to me, and I belong nowhere.”

The Americans were kind to him. They let him take hot showers, gave him a toothbrush, taught him to shoot a gun and made him a uniform.

An American commander arranged for Terry to come to New York and live with a family there.

Terry attended high school in Brooklyn, then earned a scholarship to study geology at the Colorado School of Mines. Through a neighbor of his New York family, Terry met Louise, his wife of nearly 47 years. They have three children and four grandchildren.

Terry worked for major oil companies until a flashback of a dying prisoner lying trapped under a pile of bodies as others tried to steal his last piece of bread caused him to re-evaluate his life.

“I started to think, ‘How can a human being be reduced to such a state that they’d take bread from a dying person?’” Terry said.

He decided to go to medical school, and eventually became a psychoanalyst. In his career, he treated many fellow Holocaust survivors.

Terry believes he’s here today because of a combination of luck, the ability to make quick decisions and a drive to stay alive.

He wrote a 2005 memoir, “Jakub’s World: A Boy’s Story of Loss and Survival in the Holocaust,” in which he chronicled his fight for his life.

The most important lesson he thinks the world can learn from the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II is to stand up for justice.

“People must not be bystanders and allow this kind of atrocity and evil. They must not keep silent and do nothing,” he said.

At a glance

For more information about OSU’s Holocaust Memorial Week, see http://oregonstate.edu/dept/holocaust/

program.

Mary Ann Albright covers higher education. She can be reached at maryann.albright@lee.net or 758-9518.