Elias Feinzilberg

Buenos Dias!

This post is a few weeks overdue, and I probably should have posted these photos when I posted about Yad Vashem, but oh well... A few weeks ago (mid-February) we had Elias Feinzilberg come speak to us. Each Wednesday night, we have a "forum speaker" come talk to us for about an hour. Each week there is a different local person who talks to us about current events and such. A few weeks ago, Elias came to speak to us and his story is incredible! He is a survivor of NINE concentration camps during the Holocaust. He told us his whole story from before the beginning of the war up until the liberation and afterwards. After the war, he moved to Guatemala for many years before he and his wife (also a holocaust survivor--he met her in a refugee camp after the end of the war) and children moved to the state of Israel. He doesn't speak English, so he spoke in Spanish and two students here that are fluent in Spanish translated for him. It was really an incredible experience! 

This is the only picture Elias has of his family. He is the one in the top row in the center. He was a young man when the war started, and he left his family (I believe they had just been moved to the Lodz ghetto in Poland) to do manual labor building a railroad for the Germans. He stayed alive through the war because of his ability to work hard. When he returned to find his family a few years later, he was told that his father (in the middle/right of the picture) had starved to death and the rest of his family had been sent to a concentration camp (I believe it was Auschwitz) where they were all murdered. His whole story is too long for me to even attempt recreating here, but it was really incredible to hear it and to get such a real historical perspective of the events we are studying. 

This is the number given to him at one of the camps (he ended up living in nine different concentration camps during the war including Auschwitz and Dachau). 

This is Elias Feinzilberg today. He is the cutest man! He is so happy and is such an inspiration to me. I don't think there was a dry eye in the room while he was talking, but afterwards (and during) we were all amazed by his current happy state. It was really neat! Also, his granddaughter and her husband were there and helped translate in a few parts, and it was really neat to see how life moves on, even when something so tragic and horrific happens.

This was truly an unforgettable experience. 

-E