I think that everyone knows a little about what happened in World War II. It is a truth that we all live with. A person can not look at a swastika and not know its meaning. From what I have learned, perhaps even the Hitler youth did not know its meaning. Only the Jews - those that were forced from their homes, and pressured to go into hiding knew the meaning. Those who witnessed such horror that people in this place and time can only read about. 

When I went with my classmates to see David Faber speak, I knew that it would be a moving experience. He was to talk to us about his life during WWII, and sign copies of his book, Because of Romek. All of my teachers had read his book, and cautioned anyone who wished to buy it that it is a very terrifying story. I now know what they meant. 

Hide in walls

David was only thirteen when war broke out and he and his family were forced into hiding.  Because their city was no longer safe, they moved to the city where David's uncle and aunt lived. There, they found an empty warehouse and they spent their time there. By pure luck, David's brother, Romek, who was not with the rest of his family, came to the same warehouse, and met up with his parents, brother, and sisters. Because they could not hide in a bare warehouse, Romek found one hollow wall in between two of the buildings for the family to stay.

Family captured

After a time, the Faber family moved to a different hiding place, this one on a top floor of an office building. The Nazis would search the building, but always failed to find the hidden family. This was because, when they heard the Nazis run up the iron stairs in their boots, they would dash, one at a time, into their hiding place, behind a picture frame. But one time, the Nazis came up silently. Without warning, the door flew open, and the Fabers were showered with a stream of bullets. David hurried under a couch nearby, and heard the Nazi soldiers rejoice at how they had caught the Jews. One man even started to jump up and down on the couch that David was hiding under. All of the Faber family, even Romek, who died while being tortured by the Nazis, were slaughtered; except David, and his sister who left Germany before the war.

At this point, David had no choice, but to turn himself in to the Nazis. With no family left except for his sister in another country, he had no where to go. After a tearful goodbye to the bodies of his dead sisters and mother, David set out to turn himself in. Romek had taught him to click his heels and say in German that he was 23 years of age when he saw a Nazi soldier.  David was sent to a number of different camps, even Auschwitz, the worst of all. Every time he made a friend, the Nazis would kill his friend. 

Ditches of gasoline

David was made to do horrible things in the concentration camps because of the Nazis. On one occasion, the Nazis dug trenches and ordered the unfortunate Jews to lie down in the long pits. After drenching the people in gasoline and poisons, they set fire to them, and cremated them alive. David was made to search the scorched bodies for any gold teeth or rings he could find on them. This gold was melted and used as money for the Germans. Once, David found a baby who had not breathed the poisons, and was still living. He and some other people tried their best to save the baby, but the Nazis found out, and David was made to throw it in the fire, a situation that still haunts him today. 

At the end of WWII, David, 18, starved, and nearly dead, had survived the war. When he could, he visited his only remaining sister, and lived in Europe for 20 years. After this, he moved to the United States, and became an American citizen. David did not know what an important role his brother had played in the ending of the war until long after its finish. 

As David learned at a secret meeting, his brother, Romek was the head of a project called Operation Romek. This secret operation's main goal was to make sure that the Nazis didn't get a shipment of heavy water needed to make an atom bomb. If the Nazis had succeeded in making this bomb, they would have won the war, and we would all be speaking German. But thanks to Romek and all others associated with the anti-Nazi operation, the Allies won the war, and Nazism was stamped out. All people should be grateful for the tireless effort that Romek and his coworkers put into Operation Romek.
 

At the Yellow Book Road in La Mesa, on Wednesday, the twenty-seventh of October the middle school students of Sacred Heart Academy got to share in a bit of history. David Faber, a survivor of the Holocaust, spoke to the students, their teachers and their parents. Everyone from the sixth graders to the parents was deeply moved as David poured out his story. As he shook with emotion, tears came to some eyes and some people shuddered. This trip was a once-in-a-life-time experience, one I‚m sure the students will remember for the rest of their lives. Hopefully, they will tell it to their children, and their children‚s children, so the truth will live on. Anyone who was there and anyone who purchased the humbling book, Because of Romek, will surely treasure it forever. Thank you, David Faber, for letting us share in your story, and for helping us to have a better understanding of a time we will never know and hopefully, a war we will never see.

The Conference Daily

Sunday, Feb. 26, 2006

Holocaust survivor renews educational campaign with AASA member

By Larry M. Edwards

 

The number 161051 is tattooed on his left forearm. It is the only visual evidence David Faber carried with him when liberated from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945.

“Holocaust survivors have no pictures — only memories,” Faber said.

It is those memories this Holocaust survivor and author shares with students every chance he gets. Since publishing his book, Because of Romek: A Holocaust Survivor’s Memoir, in 1993, Faber has made hundreds of appearances at public schools, community colleges and universities nationwide. Sixteen states have adopted the book as required reading in their schools.

Although he will speak to any group, he especially enjoys speaking to school kids. “They are the future of our country,” said Faber, who was taken to the first of several concentration camps in 1939 at age 13.

 “I lost the best years of my life, which you children have,” he tells students. “You can teach your own children to love, don’t teach them to hate.”

Initially, recounting his memories gave Faber a nervous breakdown. But he persevered because he knew its importance, eventually filling 11 hours of magnetic tape. San Diego State University history professor David D. Kitchen transcribed the recordings, which are now memorialized in the book.

Faber still gets emotional when telling his story. A particularly evocative memory is the day of his rescue at Bergen-Belsen, which he recalls while looking at a picture of two women in his book, Grizel Crosthwaire and Margaret Montgomery of the British Red Cross.

“They saved me,” Faber said. “I was lying among dead bodies, nearly starved to death and suffering from typhus, when they heard me groan.” He weighed 72 pounds and could no longer stand on his own.

Later, in England, Faber was reunited with his sister Rachel, the only other family member to survive World War II. Rachel had left their native Poland prior to the war and was smuggled into Great Britain. “Ninety-six members of my extended family were killed by the Nazis,” Faber said.

The personal horror of the Holocaust began for Faber the day his mother sent him out to buy milk in the Polish town of Katowice. On the street, German soldiers were rounding up Jews. “Like messengers of death, the Nazis had come,” he writes in his book.

They ordered him into a truck and took him to a nearby concentration camp. He escaped from that camp, crawling under the barbed wire at night. When he got home, his family had disappeared. He tracked them down in another town, Tarnow, where they had hoped to hide from the Nazis.

But all Jews were ordered to register with the Gestapo, who took retained Faber and his older brother, Abraham, who went by the nickname Romek and for whom Faber’s book is. Gestapo agents tortured them both, repeatedly demanding the whereabouts of a “blue file.”

Romek, who had served in the Polish army, received the harshest treatment – the agents blinded him with a hot poker. “But he never revealed the information the agents sought,” Faber said.

The younger Faber knew nothing of the mysterious blue file and the agents let him go. But not before tying him to a chair, knocking out most of his teeth, and pushing him down a flight of stairs. He never saw his brother again.

Back home, he and his family lived in terror. They were slowly starving, because Jews were forbidden from entering stores. Whenever they heard the Nazis’ boots on the stairway leading to their fourth-floor ghetto apartment, they rushed into hiding in a space behind the stairwell. But one day his father did not get into the hiding place soon enough and went to the roof instead. There the Nazis discovered him and pushed him off.

By this time – late 1942 — most of the people in the building had been killed. One day Faber went scavenging in the empty apartments and discovered jewelry the German soldiers had missed. That night, he snuck out and went to a nearby farm, where he traded the jewelry for a chicken and some eggs.

 

Faber with his book Because of Romek: A Holocaust Survivor’s Memoir

But while he and what remained of his family enjoyed their meager feast, they failed to hear the boots. As the Nazi’s kicked in the door, Faber crawled beneath a sofa and hid. His mother and five sisters were caught, however, and shot to death. After the soldiers left, Faber wiped the blood from his dead mother’s face, then embraced her body and made a vow: “I promise you, mama, I will live. I’ll tell the world what they’ve done to us.”

Faber hid in the building for several more days, but ran out of food and water. Then one day he heard a voice from a loudspeaker commanding all Jews to give themselves up or starve to death. He gave himself up.

All told, he was held in nine concentration camps, including Auchwitz, the notorious death camp in Poland. There, because he spoke German as well as Polish, the Nazis forced Faber to assist them. He had to punch holes in cans of Zyklon B pellets that were used to gas the Jews. After each group had been killed, he had to extract any teeth containing gold fillings and collect jewelry from the bodies. But the gas chambers were not efficient enough, so the Nazis resorted to other methods of killing, Faber said.

“The trains arrived day and night,” he recalled. “The Nazis dug big ditches and forced men, women and children into them, then sprayed them with gasoline.

“They burned the people alive. I can still hear their screams,” Faber said, his voice cracking with emotion.
Why did he survive when 6 million others did not? “Only God knows the answer to that,” Faber said, glancing at his book.

Nazi Hunter

In the mid-1950s, Faber emigrated from England to Springfield, Mass. Believing the war and Holocaust were behind him, he got another scare: He received a letter from the Consulate of the German Republic asking him to be a witness for his dead brother. With memories of the Gestapo still vivid in his mind, he refused. But later he learned from the FBI the German’s wanted his help in identifying Nazi war criminals. He did, recognizing an associate of brother’s by a scar on the man’s neck.

Brother stopped Hitler from getting atom bomb

“They told me he was a spy,” Faber said, “He betrayed my brother and others in the resistance movement, and he caused the deaths of 18,000 Allied soldiers.”

Faber later testified at the trial of John Demjanjuk in Israel.

As for those who, like Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, insist the Holocaust is myth, he shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

He is pleased that Holocaust denier David Irving is in jail in Austria. “I want to see justice,” he says. “Hate destroys our world. Unless we all learn to respect one another, we will destroy one another.”

With the help of his granddaughter, Anna Vaisman, Faber completed a second edition of his book, which cites further evidence gleaned from German records of the concentration camps where he’d been held. “I want her to carry on after I am gone,” said Faber, who turns 80 in July.

And during his morning visit to the AASA national conference, he unveiled a companion study guide for teachers, handing Superintendent DeZwaan the first CD. The study guide reinforces the message in Faber’s book, a message that’s directed at students, teachers and administrators alike: “Teach your children to love. Don’t let it happen again.”

For more information, contact David Faber at Faber Press, 5638 Lake Murray Blvd., #206, La Mesa, CA 91942-1929, (619) 265-7112, www.BecauseofRomek.com.