Samuel Pisar's holo fairytale - Survived 3 "death" camps - Escaped gas chamber by claiming he "was there only to wash the floor"

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The story is that Samuel survived the "death" camps of Majdanek, Auschwitz and Dachau.

That's funny, because now even Holohoax propagandists acknowledge that both Majdanek and Dachau were not extermination camps. Oh well, let's not spoil Samuel's and the Jew York Times' fun.

The Germans tried twice to kill Samuel by putting him in the gas chamber, but Samuel escaped by telling the guard that he was only there to wash the floor.

The Saturday Profile

After Survival, a Journey to Self-Recovery

Samuel Pisar, a Jewish survivor of Majdanek, Auschwitz and Dachau,
the Nazi concentration camps.

By STEVEN ERLANGER

The New York Times
Published: July 10, 2009

PARIS

A feral child still lives haunted within him, Samuel Pisar says, and mocks all his fitted suits, lovely furnishings and worldly success.

“The little one with the sunken eyes and shaved head helps a lot,” he said. “He’s very severe with me; he disapproves of so many things; he’s a kind of conscience.”

Mr. Pisar, now 80, an author, consultant and international lawyer, was 10 when his native Poland was swallowed by Hitler and Stalin. He somehow survived the death camps of Majdanek, Auschwitz and Dachau, emerging at 16, hardened and wild, his Polish family gone to ash.

He spent a year and a half with older survivors as a hooligan and black marketeer in the American occupation zone of Germany, living high for revenge, riding a BMW motorcycle, selling Lucky Strikes and used coffee grounds stolen from the kitchens of the American occupying troops, reroasted and repackaged for the Germans.

He was rescued by a French aunt, and with the help of uncles in Australia he slowly created a life, one with extraordinary accomplishments: becoming an adviser on foreign economic policy to John F. Kennedy, whom he met at Harvard, and a confidant to Presidents François Mitterrand and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of France; establishing himself as a lawyer to movie stars and corporate executives; making lots of money and finding happiness in a family that extends between France and the United States; and becoming a citizen of the United States by an act of Congress.

Mr. Pisar, pressed to confront his carefully hidden demons by his second wife, Judith, and his children, wrote a memoir in 1979, “Of Blood and Hope,” a moving saga of the nearly unspeakable, of survival and self-recovery. “I couldn’t move around any more like a shadow,” he said, “with all these taboos.”

He describes with relative openness how he was “molded to survive in the death camps, but not the Ivy League.” He survived by becoming pitiless and cruel, finding older protectors and ways to seem privileged in a hierarchy of despair, like persuading a prisoner-tailor to refashion a cap so that the stripes on the top perfectly met the stripes on the side. He was condemned to die at least twice, but managed to slip back into the general prison population, once convincing a guard that he was there only to wash the floor.

Mr. Pisar said he learned that “if you followed the law then you were dead.” He reacted like an animal, he said. “I had to learn bad habits, to be good at lying and make instant judgments about people, what they were saying, what they really thought, and not just the guards and torturers, but my fellow prisoners, too,” he said. “I was a cute kid, and there were a lot of psychotics around.”

But to rejoin the world, “I had to wipe out the first 17 years of my life,” he said. “I muted the past. I didn’t want to dabble in it. I turned to the future with a vengeance.”

STILL, a taste of bitterness and a sense of distance, even of unworthiness, have persisted through most of his life, Mr. Pisar said in a series of interviews here. Even as he wrote about his liberation from Auschwitz, he noted that there were more people murdered in that one death camp on D-Day than there were Allied troops killed on the Normandy beaches “on this, their longest day.”

Years later, having been pressed by Judith’s friend Leonard Bernstein, Mr. Pisar, like Job, has taken his arguments to God. Mr. Bernstein, always unhappy with the lyrics of the “Kaddish” Symphony No. 3 he wrote in 1963 and dedicated to the assassinated President Kennedy, asked Mr. Pisar, who had seen hell, to write them instead. Mr. Pisar refused, feeling that his talents were unequal to the music.

But after Mr. Bernstein’s death, and prompted by 9/11, Mr. Pisar finally accepted the task, writing a version of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, first performed in 2003.

Mr. Pisar calls it “A Dialogue with God.” But he keeps refining the text — he is always arguing with himself, said his daughter, Leah Pisar, among his first readers.

With the same “visceral voice I once raised against you as a skeletal kid” at the edge of the gas chamber, he demands of God: “Why do You abandon us? How can You allow such carnage? Do You even care?”

Mr. Pisar describes the Jews heading for the gas “with Your name on their lips,” and says it imposes obligations on God, too. “The Auschwitz number engraved on my arm reminds me of it every day,” he said. “And today, Father, I remind You!”

He said he was no longer furious with God. But pressed, he said: “I’m angry. And he may not even be there. But I love him, too. Because we have loved him for so many thousands of years.”

Last month, Mr. Pisar performed his Kaddish for the first time in Israel, to a hushed audience at the Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem.
THE concert was a memorial to the victims of the Warsaw ghetto, and it was also, to Leah Pisar, a sort of homecoming. “It was so much more resonant there than elsewhere,” she said. “Yad Vashem is the place where one feels closest to those who perished. It was as if he was saying Kaddish for all the six million.”

He likes to talk of the cunning child inside him. In May, in Bialystok, Poland, where he was born, he said, “I am not sure which of my two voices is more authentic, or more relevant for survival in our crisis-ridden world.”

He is not sure, but he suspects. His Kaddish is also an argument with other men about the degradation of the world in the name of big ideas. But it is also a memorial to his lost family, when he recites, “My memory is the only tomb they have.”

The family’s tradition of public service continues. Leah Pisar worked in the State Department and White House under President Bill Clinton. His stepson, Antony J. Blinken, is national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Pisar also has two daughters from his first marriage.

The German government still pays him, as a survivor, $700 a month, “but I’ve never been able to invest it in a normal way,” he said. For all the money he has made and given away, “that money is still intact.”

He wrote that he would use it to create some physical memorial to his parents, “and I will get around to it,” he said uncomfortably. “My children say to me, I have to do it,” he said, “and one day I will, sooner rather than later.”

He talks of being open now, but he keeps much hidden. He says he is better with his grandchildren than his children. Even with Leah, he said, “I was willing to tell her a little but not a lot — I fenced with her a little.”

Later, he said, “I never spoke about the real horrors — not even with the Germans.” Then later: “I remember every detail. But I don’t suffer from it.” And then he said: “It helped me in life. And tragic as it was, it was a positive experience. I would never have been the way I am.”

The Kaddish has liberated him, he said; he feels more at ease with the mystery of God. “It’s not just that he’s waiting for me,” Mr. Pisar said. “I’m more at peace. I’m ready.”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 11, 2009, on page A8 of the New York edition.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/world/europe/11profile.html?_r=1

Article: "After Survival, a Journey to Self-Recovery"

Samuel Pisar's holo fairytale - Survived 3 "death" camps - Escaped gas chamber by claiming he "was there only to wash the floor"

After Survival, a Journey to Self-Recovery

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- David Ben-Gurion, Israeli Prime Minister