By Rachel Young,
Staff Writer

For this last column, I wanted to end on a more serious note. I interviewed Holocaust survivor Jack Sittsamer, and decided to share this experience with Setonian readers.

I first saw Jack at Seton Hill University’s (SHU) Kristallnacht remembrance service held in our chapel. For those who attended, it was a very beautiful service with singing, candles and spoken verse. Afterward in the parlors, there was a reception where I met Jack and heard about his life after liberation.

Monday afternoon, I arrived at Squirrel Hill at the Pittsburgh Jewish Community Center where Jack greeted me. In the Holocaust Center, we sat in a quiet classroom with artifacts and quotes. He was gracious enough to sit with me and tell his story.
While I audio recorded and jotted, I asked the standard questions of a survivor: what was your family like? When was your liberation? Did you ever lose your faith?

Instead I got a full account from him, as well as a better understanding of his youth.
Being transported between camps and forced to work endless hours was only a small part of his struggle. His personal faith and strong heart brought him to survive. Growing up, he attended Catholic school, though he was Jewish. He lived with his family in the town of Milec, Poland, held down by a very religious father and a hardworking mother. Jack was 14 when he was taken out of his home.

On March 9, 1942, I heard noises--shooting, screaming. Everybody was chased out in the middle of the night.

On the march to the airplane factory near his house, Jack saw his family for the last time. He witnessed his father being killed, and was separated from his mother and siblings.

I was there for 3 months working for the airplane factory, and then it became a concentration camp. We wore a jacket with a red star on the shirt, and our number printed on our knee.

Then Jack showed me the tattoo on his hand. ‘K L’ which roughly translates to camp labor. Jack worked seven days a week for twelve hours a day. The conditions were unsanitary, and there was a fear of typhoid.

Someone carried me into day and night shift barracks. I don’t know who, but thankfully I was always in the right place at the right time.

Jack’s strength shines through his eyes as he speaks. It’s as if the matter of the Holocaust was something he was able to transform into personal power. He’s very detailed and motivated when he’s describing the conditions of the camps.

I was in Leitmeritz in the Czech Republic in late 1944, which was the last invasion of France. There were crematoriums and a death camp. We had to dig a tunnel by hand. Eight hundred people remained from the original 2,400. All the factories were underground. Four hundred were taken to Dachau, a major camp, for 2 months. I went to Mauthausen, Austria, another death camp with a deep stone quarry. Again it was carrying and breaking up stones-it was 186 steps, as I counted later.

Jack was liberated from Gussyn II, a subcamp of Mauthausen on May 5, 1945. He weighed only 72 pounds, and was thankful he was taken, knowing he
wouldn’t have had much longer.

“My first meal was scrambled eggs with toast and jelly,” Jack remembers. He remembers his first hot shower with soap, a towel and new clothes.

“I still have nightmares,” Jack said. He told me of his trip to Poland and revisiting the camps. “It’s a different world there,” he said. The order of events and placing of statistics is still fresh in his mind. You can tell he’s done this before. In fact, after Jack retired in 1986, he began to speak publicly about his experience for groups and classrooms.

Jack is now the president of the Pittsburgh Holocaust Survivors Organization. He speaks openly with his son and daughter about his experience, and stressed the importance of education through experience. Jack helped me see that I’m lucky to be alive with all I have, and after speaking to him, I could appreciate the little things so much more.

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