Arnold Klebbs opens the door and apologizes for not hearing the knock. He was busy with carpentry. At 92, he looks excellent, completely independent, articulate, and clear-minded. He recently celebrated his birthday, but for him, the real celebration comes on May 5, the day he was liberated 80 years ago from the Birkenau camp with other survivors by the American Army. This year, he feels particularly emotional about returning for the first time to the place where his life nearly ended.
Klebbs will participate in the March of the Living as part of a special delegation including 40 survivors from Israel – survivors of death camps, children who were hidden or survived in forests – who will walk, many for the first time since the war, along the same route as the death marches, this time accompanied by their family members. The march, one of the flagship events of Holocaust Remembrance Day, will mark 80 years since Europe's liberation from the Nazi regime and the end of World War II.
"This is a once-in-a-generation march," Revital Yakin Krakovsky, deputy CEO of the International March of the Living, said. "80 Holocaust survivors from around the world will lead the way for thousands who are receiving from them the responsibility for Holocaust remembrance in future generations."
Klebbs was born in Lithuania and was eight years old when the war broke out. His mother and sister survived; his father did not. In 1944, women and men were separated, and a few weeks later, he was separated from his father. At the moment of final parting, his father whispered to him the address of their family in the United States, which he burned into his memory.
In the Kovno ghetto, young Arnold understood that Jewish lives held no value. From the window, he watched a German soldier shoot a Jewish doctor dead simply because he didn't remove his hat quickly enough. His parents dug a narrow hiding place for him beneath the floorboards, where he concealed himself when Nazis came to conduct another mass deportation operation. That's how he survived the first time.
"In the ghetto, I experienced what true despair feels like. There were 30,000 Jews there, and one day the Nazis took 10,000 and shot them. It was a miracle they didn't take us. It was clear it was only a matter of time until they would murder us." After two years, the journey to concentration camps began – eleven in total. Each posed its own threats, but the Austrian concentration camp Gunskirchen (Wels II) was the most horrific. "There was no order, the place was strewn with bodies that weren't removed. They didn't feed us, they just let us die."
He arrived at Birkenau with 128 other children from Lithuania. The group was led by a 16-year-old boy who taught them to behave like strong, tough young men in order to survive. This convinced the SS officers to keep them alive rather than sending them immediately to the gas chambers. Weeks later, the boys underwent a selection by Dr. Joseph Mengele, who sent 75 of them to the gas chambers. He interrogated Arnold and, for some reason, allowed him to continue living. That evening, the child gazed at the crematorium chimneys and knew that the smoke rising from them contained the remains of his friends.
"One of the boys in our group managed to smuggle his tefillin in his shoes, and before we went out to work, he would secretly put on tefillin. We would stand around him to hide him and warn him if someone was approaching. I witnessed someone risking his life to fulfill a commandment – that made a tremendous impression on me."
How do you survive the grief over the death of those close to you, I ask him. "You don't think about it. The hunger was so terrible that all I thought about was how to get another slice of bread. The body takes over the mind. You no longer think like a human being, but like an animal."
Another thing that helped him avoid falling into despair was his friends. There was a rare solidarity between them that often saved their lives. "For example, during one of the death marches, we walked for four days and four nights nonstop, without food or water. At one point, I was so exhausted that they linked arms and carried me. Or when we were ordered to lie on the snow and I fell asleep immediately, and when they announced it was time to get up, I didn't wake up. My friends lifted me and carried me," Arnold Klebbs said. Only 25 of his friends survived the horrors.
At the end of this march, the survivors were loaded onto cattle cars without toilets, food, or water. They traveled for a week, with Arnold scraping ice from the walls of the cars to drink. The Allies mistakenly bombed the train, and many Jews were killed. The train stopped at Mauthausen, and Arnold was separated from his friends, who stayed in a nearby tent.
"I wanted to be with them. I left the tent, and then I saw an SS officer. I ran away from him back to the tent, and he tried to shoot me, but missed. Jews from the tent hid me under a blanket, and he didn't find me. That night, the Allies bombed the neighboring tent, the one I had tried to escape to, and many were killed.
"When the war ended, I came out of the forest and didn't know where to go. I understood that if the American army was driving to the right, it meant they were still fighting the Germans, so I went in the opposite direction. I asked them for food, and they threw me chocolate, which made me very sick. We were a small group of friends who survived. The owners of a small Austrian farm gave us food and a place to sleep. The next day, we met American soldiers, who put us in the barracks of German soldiers who had fled."
Later, he joined the Jewish Brigade. "It's hard to describe how I felt when I saw a Jewish soldier with a Star of David and a rifle. They danced the hora with us around a bonfire, and protected us as if we were their children. They put us in an orphanage in southern Italy, and one day a journalist from Tel Aviv came and interviewed me. Through that article, my mother found me and came to me. When I saw her, we ran to each other. She had been liberated along with my sister. Meanwhile, my sister had fallen in love with a soldier from the brigade, and they immigrated to Israel after he was discharged."
After his mother's second marriage, the family moved to the US, to the same address his father had whispered to him. "I didn't want to go. I wanted to be with my friends who survived with me and immigrated to Israel. I had always been a Zionist, and as a child, we learned Hebrew. But they didn't ask me."
He grew up, studied dentistry, and married a German woman who converted to Judaism for him. They had two children, and after his wife died in a car accident, he immigrated to Israel.
"Every day, images come to me. I see my father standing in front of me, giving me the address in America. I see Mengele sending my friends to their deaths. But I don't dwell on it, because I move on to thinking about my children, about my life, about the luck I have, and about the fact that today I am in Jerusalem. Looking back, when I consider all the coincidences that helped me survive, I believe that God helped me. Why me and not my amazing friends? I have no answer for that. In the camps themselves, I didn't think about why I was surviving or where God was. I just wanted to survive another day."
And why is he traveling to lead the March of the Living and step again for the first time on that cursed ground? "At Birkenau, for the first time since liberation, I will be able to say Kaddish [mourner's prayer] for all the friends I saw going up in smoke. I don't need a list with their names, I remember them every day. My children are coming with me. It's important to me that they see that terrible place."
"Hope to return with my spirit intact"
"Every time I tell my story, it comes back to me at night, and then I can't sleep," Yosef Farkash explained. He is 97, born in Hungary to a poor family, the ninth of 13 siblings. In 1944, when he was 16, the country was conquered by the Germans, and he realized he had to take action.
"I heard about Kristallnacht, I heard the news, also from refugees who came to us and told of the horrors they had experienced." Shortly before Passover, Jewish teenagers were forced to build the ghetto fences, and during Passover, families were moved inside. On the first day of the Hebrew month of Sivan, everyone was loaded onto trains to Auschwitz, and from there, Yosef's journey began.
After Auschwitz, he was in the Fünfteichen camp, where he worked cleaning toxic paint cans. From there, he was transferred to the main camp, Gross-Rosen, where he had to carry a 110-pound cement bag to the second floor of a building under construction. When work was pressured, they would put two bags on his back – 220 pounds, three times more than his body weight in those days. Once, one of the bags fell from Yosef's back, and the guard threw him from the second floor. His nose was broken in this fall.
"One day, I saw an empty cement bag in the garbage dump. I made a tank top from it so I would be warmer. In the evening, I returned to the camp, and the guards saw that I was too fat. There was a court in the camp that wanted to send me to the gallows, but my defender said I wasn't yet 18, so they commuted the sentence to 25 lashes. I probably wouldn't have survived them and would have died. But then a miracle happened: moments before they started beating me, an alarm sounded. The British Air Force arrived and bombed around the camp. Everyone scattered."
In October-November 1944, the Jews were sent on the death march. "In this march, whoever couldn't continue fell. The guards shot them in the head, and they remained there. I went through everything, saw the shootings, and we continued walking, like a herd, without question. Without thoughts. It's hard to explain. We walked."
At some point, they were loaded onto a cattle train, 200 people in an open car. It was impossible to sit. There was a guard who cordoned himself off, and occasionally he would fire a burst of bullets. Yosef was wounded in the leg by one of these bullet fragments. Of course, he didn't tell anyone about his injury, because he knew they would kill him for it.
In February 1945, Yosef was transferred to Buchenwald, where he stayed until April 11, liberation day. "In Buchenwald there were more than 25,000 people. When the American army arrived by surprise, the German guards were still at their posts, and that's how they captured the camp. The rabbi of the American army gathered the Jews who were in the camp. I didn't get out of bed for four days because of the gunshot wound. I didn't eat anything for eight days, just drank. When the military doctors arrived, they carried me in their arms, like a child. I weighed less than 62 pounds."
Together with other Jews, Yosef Farkash was evacuated to Switzerland on Rabbi Schechter's children's train, where he was hospitalized for about six months. There, he joined Youth Aliyah and met Shoshana, also a Holocaust survivor. They fell in love and married in Jaffa on November 29, 1949. They had three children and adopted three more biological siblings whose mother died in childbirth. When asked what kept him alive all this time, Yosef answered that it was his belief in life, his optimism. "I always believed tomorrow would be better."
Yosef's son, Shraga, said that until 2001, they didn't talk about the Holocaust at home. "I didn't tell the children the difficult stories," Yosef explained. "I wanted to protect them. I didn't focus on the hardship, the evil; I just looked forward and tried to see the good. I wanted them to also think that tomorrow would be better."
The father's hardships were revealed to his son by chance. "In 2001, my father was sitting at my place, and I saw he had a dent in his leg. I asked him if he had been hit, and it was like Pandora's box opening. He told everything. I told him we needed to go full circle: we should go to Auschwitz, Birkenau, and to his childhood town. We scheduled a trip, and suddenly he had a severe ulcer. It was clearly mentally difficult for him, but eventually it worked out and we went."
In the early 2000s, the bombed crematoria in Auschwitz were not yet fenced off, and it was possible to enter them. Yosef crawled under the ruins and lit a memorial candle. At that moment, he told his son that his revenge on the Nazis was that he had raised a family in Israel. When they returned home, Yosef showed his children a photo from liberation day, taken by an American soldier.
Another way Yosef's children learned about his experiences during those dark years was through his grandchildren's family history assignments. They interviewed him, and he told them an age-appropriate, softer version of the events ("without drama, without horrors"), as he also did in their schools. Yosef shared his story in the "Zikaron BaSalon" project (a social initiative of informal gatherings in private homes on Holocaust Remembrance Day), at Israel Defense Forces bases, and even testified before the IDF General Staff Forum.
This year, he received an invitation to lead the March of the Living with other survivors, marking 80 years since the liberation of the camps. His son and 14 of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren will accompany him. Nevertheless, the thought of returning to the camps weighs on him and stirs memories that haunt his dreams. Additionally, he has always opposed organized Holocaust education trips that take Israeli students to Poland to visit death camps and other Holocaust sites. "We don't need to send children there. The money we invest in these trips goes to the Poles, and they don't deserve it. They were worse than the Germans."
So why go? I asked. "The children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren – they all want me to come. I told my son that I don't know if I can go through all this again, because even when I went to tell my life story in schools, for several days I couldn't sleep. But my children convinced me that I am the head of the tribe, and that gave me confidence.
"Physically, I'll be fine. Mentally, I need to maintain the unity of the family. Because when they all embrace me, then we're all together. They're taking me there with love, I'm not going alone. We'll see how it works. I hope that with my children's support, I'll return with my spirit intact."
"Liberation was an empty victory"
Nathan Leipciger – Nate, asked me to wait a moment while he gets a hat. "Without it, I'm just an old man," he laughed during our video call from his home in Canada. It's a Polish leather cap that Nate has worn for 25 years, every time he goes to the March of the Living. It's his trademark.
The moment he puts on the hat, there's no stopping his flow of speech. He expresses himself fluently, in elevated language, with a clear-sighted and sensitive perspective.
"October 7 changed everything for survivors, because the impossible, the unexpected, and the inconceivable happened again. It was in a different place and under different circumstances, but this evil returned. It threw me off balance. I almost sank into despair, and it took me time to get out of that state. I managed to do it because I understood that today we are not helpless like we were in 1939. Today, we are part of an amazing country that represents us, which is the homeland of all Jews worldwide. If we ever thought that we, Diaspora Jews, could disconnect from Israel, October 7 made the opposite clear to us.
"At the same time, I understood something else: that our enemies today are not acting out of antisemitism, but they seek to destroy the entire Western culture, not just the Jewish people. The attack on Israel is just the first step in this struggle."
Nate, 97, is energetic and articulate. When he was 11, the Nazis invaded and conquered Poland. His world turned upside down when he was expelled with his parents and 14-year-old sister to the Sosnowiec ghetto. His father was sent to a labor camp, and Nate took an electrician course. For the next three years, he worked as an electrician's apprentice in a factory, and in 1943, his father returned to the ghetto, and the entire family was deported to Auschwitz. Men and women were separated at the camp. In a coincidence that's hard to explain, his father knew one of the Nazi officers and asked him to remove his son from the line of those condemned to death – and so it happened.
"What are the odds of that happening?! But it did happen, and I joined my father in the concentration camp. In an instant, I became a prisoner – without a name, just a number – but alive."
Life expectancy in the camp was four months. His father intervened again, and they were transferred to work in a factory near Breslau. In January 1945, when the Nazis realized their time was limited, they forced everyone who had managed to survive in the camps on death marches, without food and water for many days. Nate and his father walked in no fewer than five such marches. Thousands died along the way.
"When we arrived at Dachau in one of the marches, I almost gave up, and my father was angry that I was considering giving up. The survival mechanism during those two years was hope. The moment you lost it, your fate was sealed. But in Dachau, just before liberation, I almost lost hope because I was physically exhausted to the point of collapse. My father said I had no right to lose hope – and I listened to him."
Miraculously, for a reason still unclear to Nate today, the camp commander allowed them to stay in the camp instead of joining another death march, and they remained there until the American army arrived and liberated them. "I felt our liberation was an empty victory. We were alive, but we understood that we might be the only ones who survived from our entire family. We had no home and no country. I was hospitalized for three months because I contracted typhus, which almost killed me. Slowly, we began the journey back to life.
"My father was one of eight siblings. He had one brother in Canada, and the rest were slaughtered in the Holocaust. I had 14 cousins – only four survived. I was very fortunate to reach Canada in 1948. There I went to school, and after two years I went to study engineering at university. I got married and had three children, 19 grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren, thank God."
This year, Nate will walk in the March of the Living for the 21st time. "It's part of my life and my legacy as a Holocaust survivor. I feel it's the best way to pass on this lesson to young people, at the end of which they will deeply understand what it means to be Jewish, with our losses and victories. As the years go by, it becomes harder and harder, both mentally and physically. It takes me longer to recover from the trip, but I know it's necessary to teach the younger generation.
"Despite everything I've been through – I cannot hate, not even the Nazis. Because hatred is blind, and it prevents us from doing the right thing. We needed to bring them to trial and achieve justice. So many of them escaped. If we hate, we give up part of our humanity. That's what I say at the March of the Living. People ask me if I hate the descendants of the Nazis, and I say no. The sins of the parents do not pass to their children.
"Dealing with antisemitism in general, and the March of the Living in particular, looks different since October 7. It's more urgent, more important. The message I convey to groups has also changed. If in the past it was 'be proud Jews,' today I add 'be proud Zionists.' Zionism connects us, Diaspora Jews and Israel, religious and secular, in one common goal. We said 'never again,' and it sounds like an empty slogan – but it strengthens us. It's the only way to overcome difficulties."
