The speech by Dr. Medler was very moving, he dicussed his life in in twelve concentration camps. He told us when he and his family were being seperated his mother said to him, " Respect others, remember who you are and where you came from". That was the last thing his mother ever said to him and the last time he ever saw his family. I feel so aweful for him because I don't know what I would do if I was never about to see the ones I love and to know that they are going through such pain would kill me inside. He also told us that at one of the concentration camps he was held in, he and many others had to lower a cemetary and build barricks. He said that he would dig up skills and take the gold teeth from the mouths and trade them in for food. When they went to another concentration camp there was a very large building, he was only 15 yrs old so he asked someone what was made in the factory. Someone told him the it wasn't a factory, it was a place of death. If you went into the "factory" you wouldn't come out. It was to burn people alive, what he said then was so powerful, he said that he could smell burning flesh, and horrifying screams. At the same camp a guard came over to him and said "you stepped on my toe", Mendler said no I didn't, which got him twenty-five lashes. There was so much damage to his back that he had to have a plate put in it when he came the U.S. He finally was free at the age of 18 and he weighed only 75Ibs!When everything was said and done, out of 75 people in his family he was the only one that survived and out of the thousands+ of Jews in his town he was only 1 of 39 people that survived. This lecture was very powerful, it told me first hand what had happened instead of reading it from a history book. I'm glad that Dr. Mendler was gracious enough to come here and talk about his experience in the Holocaust with us.
Posted by Kayla Lukacs at September 23, 2004 10:21 AM