Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2005 | 11:13 a.m.
Thousands of people, frightened and tightly packed into cattle cars, arrived at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp during World War II and faced the same horror.
Nazi SS soldiers carrying machine guns and holding barking German shepherds on short leashes flung open the doors of the cars and rushed the people off the train.
Confused, the captives poured into the darkness. The air was filled with the stench of burned bodies emanating from the smokestacks of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoriums, which were next to the gas chambers -- the final stop for the old, very young and physically disabled among that human cargo.
Auschwitz in southern Poland was the site of the largest mass murder in history. It played a key role in Adolf Hitler's "final solution." In all, 1.5 million of the 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews who were slain during the Holocaust died at Auschwitz between 1942 and 1945.
On Thursday, 10,000 people, including 1,000 Auschwitz survivors, are expected to attend ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by the Soviet Red Army.
Among them will be 79-year-old Ernest "Ernie" Ostreicher, a Las Vegas resident of 10 years, who is hoping his return to the place of his worst nightmares -- a site where his mother, father, three sisters, grandmother, aunt and uncle all were killed -- will bring him closure.
"I will turn 80 years old in April and I feel obligated to go back now and pay tribute to those who died," said Ostreicher, who arrived at Auschwitz by train in 1944 with 2,000 others from his native Sighet, Hungary.
"To me, this is not about the survivors. This is about those who died. Not enough has been done to pay tribute to the people who were so brutally annihilated."
Perry Oehlbaum, 71, a Las Vegas resident of eight years, arrived at Auschwitz from her native Miskolic, Hungary, in September 1944. She and her sister Aviva survived, but their parents were killed at Auschwitz.
"When we stepped off the train, the very young and old and the afflicted were told to go to one side and the rest to the other side," she said, noting that initially she was placed with the old, young and afflicted.
"Neighbors dragged me to the other side," she said. Within 24 hours all of the people on the side where she had initially stood were killed, she said.
Ben Lesser, 76, a Las Vegas resident of 10 years, spent four years dodging the Nazis who had killed his parents. Lesser, a native of Krakow, Poland, escaped to Hungary in 1943 where he was captured in Muncatch and taken to Auschwitz, where his sister and brother later died.
Lesser said the sadistic Auschwitz camp doctor Josef Mengele asked Lesser if he wanted to ride in a transport truck or run alongside of it for several miles.
"I told him I was an able-bodied man, ready to work and that I would run instead of ride," Lesser recalled.
"Everyone who ran that day lived. Everyone who rode on the transport was lined up and killed by machine gun fire."
Lesser said he can understand Ostreicher wanting to return to Auschwitz and Oehlbaum deciding to stay away.
"I returned to Auschwitz five years ago and it was just heart-breaking," Lesser said. "I was happy to help pay tribute to those who died. But I can understand that not everyone can do that. For some it is just too painful."
But what is even more painful for some survivors history repeated itself with recent genocides in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia, among other places.
Robert Clary, an actor, Nazi death camp survivor and Holocaust lecturer who lost 13 family members at death camps, including his parents who were killed at Auschwitz, laments that such events have followed in the wake of the Holocaust.
"Sadly we do not learn our lessons from history," said Clary, who portrayed World War II prisoner of war Cpl. Louis Lebeau in the 1960s television sitcom "Hogan's Heroes." "We keep making the same mistakes. Man's inhumanity to man will not stop."
However, the veil of denial and ignorance of the Holocaust in the 1940s and '50s has been credited by experts for allowing revisionists to gain a forum in the 1960s, '70s and '80s to argue that the Holocaust never happened.
Clary did not speak of his own experiences at the Buchenwald death camp until the 1980s.
However, after watching a Holocaust documentary, he felt guilty that he had failed to use his celebrity to enlighten the world about what had happened. As a result Clary joined the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and became a renowned speaker on the subject.
"One of the reasons I lectured on the Holocaust for more than 20 years was to stand up against the revisionists," said Clary, 79, who is a retired great-grandfather living in Southern California.
"Those of us who have spoken out and continue to speak have left legacies -- audio tapes and films -- that will serve as a base for future generations to use as they carry on our work so that no one ever again can deny the truth."
The celebration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, given man's limited longevity, might be the last significant gathering of most of the remaining Holocaust survivors.
Representatives from about 40 countries are expected to attend the ceremony at the ruins of Birkenau's crematoriums. Officials of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum say about 1,500 reporters are expected to cover the event.
Political leaders who plan to attend include Vice President Dick Cheney, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, Israeli President Moshe Katzav, German President Horst Koehler, Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Jacques Chirac, Netherlands Queen Beatrix and Britain's Prince Edward.
They will commemorate a tragedy that was compounded by the Nazis' final efforts to try to obliterate proof of the evil they had created.
When the liberation of Auschwitz became apparent, the Nazis fled on Jan. 17, 1945, taking the camp's remaining 60,000 prisoners on a death march in freezing weather. But that march ended 10 days later with the soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front liberating 7,000 survivors.
Ostreicher immigrated to the United States in 1949 and became a jeweler and later a retailer. Oehlbaum came to the United States in 1951 and worked in an insurance office and later raised a family. Lesser moved to the United States in 1947 and became a truck driver and later a realtor.
Henry Schuster, who with his wife, Anita, is co-founder of the Holocaust Survivors Group of Southern Nevada, says the accounts of Holocaust survivors such as Ostreicher, Oehlbaum and Lesser forces society to address its past human rights failures and hopefully use what is learned to make the world better.
"It is important to remember Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps -- but especially Auschwitz because it was the most notorious of all," said Henry Schuster, who lost several family members in Nazi death camps.
There are about 120,000 survivors of the Holocaust living in the United States, according to the World Jewish Congress. The American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors estimates that in the United States there are 280,000 Holocaust survivors and family members of survivors.
The Holocaust Survivors Group of Southern Nevada was founded in 1995 with 35 members and has grown to more than 300.
There are 98 Holocaust survivors in Nevada who have registered with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. However, the Holocaust Insurance Guidebook cautions that some estimates of U.S. survivor populations suggest that the actual number of Holocaust survivors in Nevada and elsewhere may be "three or four times" greater than the number registered.
Activists say that education about the Holocaust must remain constant so that what has been learned is not at risk to be forgotten.
Lesser points to a survey conducted and released last month by the British Broadcasting Company that found that 60 percent of women and people younger than 35 in England had never heard of Auschwitz and that 45 percent of all Britons said they had never heard of that death camp.
Edythe Katz Yarchever, chairwoman of the Nevada Governor's Advisory Council on Education Relating to the Holocaust and an official of the Holocaust Library at the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas, said Las Vegas is a leader in helping young people understand and appreciate the sacrifices of Holocaust victims.
"We have in Las Vegas one of the most extensive Holocaust libraries in the United States," she said. "While we are seeing a number of students using the library for research on the Holocaust, we would like to see a lot more."
She said Clark County students are being taught the Holocaust library's latest curriculum dealing with "perpetrators, victims, bystanders and rescuers." Yarchever says the bystander part deals with "people who did nothing," which she said opened the door for the perpetrators to kill millions.
Also, Yarchever said, every year in March, 500 local students attend the Conference on Holocaust Education at the Venetian hotel, which deals in part with lessons learned from Auschwitz and other death camps.
"When you look at Auschwitz and the other camps you realize the emotional impact of the absolute cruelty that can be done to humans," she said.
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