Holocaust survivor shares story with hundreds Monday

Impacting 400 students for almost two hours, Holocaust survivor Sam Offen presented an account of his life Monday evening in Pearce Hall.
His presentation, "The Holocaust: A Survivor's Story," was presented by the Hillel Jewish Student Organization.
"My name is Sam Offen and I'm a very lucky Holocaust survivor," Offen said to begin his presentation.
Offen was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1921 and lived a life of poverty, he said. The son of a shoemaker, he described the two-room apartment where he grew up with his parents, three brothers, sister, grandmother and great-grandmother.
"We did not know anything else," he said.
Offen said he was not a public speaker.
"All I do is recall my personal life as best I can. I decided if I was going to speak, I wanted to speak to young people like yourselves. You are our future leaders," he said.
He led the audience on a narrated tour through his years under the brutality of the Nazis, from Sept. 1, 1939, until his liberation on May 5, 1945.
Offen described the political system of Poland at the time and his family's involvement. His father fought in World War I for Austria and also for Poland and people visited their home to discuss political problems.
"And then something happened," he said.
In September 1939 the Nazi army invaded Poland, he recounted. The Polish people were fed propaganda that led them to believe the Polish army was invincible and the actions of the Nazi army were simply maneuvers, large-scale exercises of troops and warships, but his father thought otherwise.
Offen said he remembers bringing home a piece of metal to his father and learning it was ammunition.
"My father said, 'Armies don't have maneuvers with live ammunition.'
"Within six days they came to my beloved city of Krakow. On the sixth of September life changed completely," he said.
Offen continued to give an account of the war including his time spent in the Krakow ghetto and the years he spent in Nazi concentration camps including Mathausen and Gusen. Gusen was known, according to the JewishGen Web site, as "the Hell of hells." Prisoners were forced to carry boulders from a stone quarry approximately 100 steps away all day long.
"(Gusen) was one of the worst ones humanity can find," Offen said.
The abuse and murder Offen described was continual, brutal and horrific.
He described witnessing Jewish people being beaten and shot in the streets of Krakow, watching countless daily hangings in the square of the camps, finding prisoners dead in the mornings at the latrines and watching Jews commit suicide by running into the barbed-wire fences and if that didn't kill them, the tower guards would shoot them, he said.
"That was a daily occurrence in the camps. Beatings and killings. For no other reason. Just because we were born Jewish," Offen said.
He also spent time in Mathausen, one of the camps featured in the 1993 movie, "Schindler's List."
"'Schindler's List' was factual with one exception: In reality, it was worse. I think they tried to soften it just a little bit for public consumption," he said.
Offen said he felt his time had run out one day in Mathausen when the head of the camp chose him as the target for his daily routine of siccing two German Shepherd dogs on the first prisoner that he encountered.
Working on the side of the road, Offen managed to keep his shovel moving as the dogs attacked both of his sides until the Nazi called the dogs off and let him live. The head of the camp who targeted Offen was depicted in "Schindler's List" as using humans as target practice.
The Jews of Krakow were forced to destroy their own cemetery, including digging up graves and knocking over monuments, to build a concentration camp.
"Yet, under the threat of death, we had to do it," Offen said.
Offen described being forced into cattle cars and traveling standing up for days with people urinating, defecating and dying around him.
"The heat was oppressive. The hunger, overwhelming. The thirst, unbearable," Offen said.
At night the guards would sometimes open the door and tell them to throw out the dead bodies. The entire car full of people may have received a couple loaves of bread and a bucket of water, Offen said, nothing more.
"I remember because that is how I 'celebrated' one of my birthdays. Aug. 7, 1944," Offen said.
He recounted close encounters with death and lucky breaks that kept him alive.
He cleaned the houses of Austrian Quakers who were in the camp because they were conscientious objectors to the actions of the Nazis. The Quakers had heat and food, though, and shared with Offen.
One of the Quakers had a son in the army and was sending letters that said the Germans were losing the war.
On May 5, 1945, Sam Offen weighed 70 pounds. The camp was unusually quiet and the Nazis did not come to put them to work.
"We didn't know what it was. We were waiting, waiting," Offen said.
One of the men in the barracks looked out of the window in the building and saw American tanks, he said.
"They said to us. 'You are free'."
In an introduction to Offen's talk, Hillel Jewish Student Organization President Jason Levinson, New York graduate student, discussed why the Holocaust should continue to be discussed.
"It is the greatest atrocity ever to occur on the planet," Levinson said. "The first reason why we remember this is the knowledge of what hate can do allows us to stop further tragedies."
The second reason, Levinson said, is the movement, primarily in the United States, to deny that the Holocaust ever happened. People called Holocaust revisionists are seeking to discredit the memory of those who died and lived in concentration camps and through the Holocaust.
"There are those out there who want you to forget," Levinson said.
Offen lost over 50 relatives during the Holocaust.
"After the war I found out they (Offen's mother and sister) were sent to an extermination camp and gassed to death," Offen said.
However, both of his brothers survived. One was with him until his liberation at Gusen, and his youngest brother was a survivor of Auschwitz.
"Very few families were left with any survivors, much less three from one family," he said.
The effects of the Holocaust on Offen have been lifelong.
"We didn't talk about it. I lived a seemingly normal life, trying to forget my past," he said. "To this day I have nightmares. I yell and scream. My wife must shake me to reality.
"You must know what happened in these horrible days. They say history repeats itself. I'm here to tell you I hope it doesn't. I beg you, fight injustice and bigotry. Thank you and God bless America."
Offen answered a multitude of questions from the audience after his presentation that ranged from the treatment of the Jews by Polish citizens to the possibility of Jewish uprising.
"You have to realize it was very difficult to organize any resistance. How can we do it with bare hands? And where do I get my next piece of bread?" Offen said.
Kelly Johnson, Kent City freshman, said it was amazing to hear Offen's story.
"I thought it was awesome to hear it first person. To hear the details that people don't tell you to make it more gentle," she said.
Kristy Davis, Riverview senior, said the presentation was moving and touching.
"It was so sad to hear about all of these people getting killed for such a stupid reason," she said.