Simon Rozenkier
Simon claims he was sterilized himself at Auschwitz from
repeatedly being injected with chemicals that he was
told were vitamin supplements.
The Nazis told him "These shots will give you muscles to work. Do you understand that, you redheaded dog?"
He said the sterilization shots "caused his genitalia to swell and bleed and caused wrenching pain for days."
Before being taken to a concentration camp, Simon escaped the ghetto in his native Poland and slept in a cemetery next to an aunt's grave for several months.
At Auschwitz, Simon says he was spared from the gas chamber "because the Nazi doctors thought he had unusual genes" and "were trying to figure out why this Jew got red hair."
Of Mengele, he says "sometimes he gave people a piece of chocolate, and the next minute he shoots them in the head."
Simon says he personally saw a hunchback who's hump had been cut off by Dr. Mengele, and that Mengele threw a man into a bath of ice and let him freeze to death.
He also says he saw Nazi doctors administer X-rays to the genitalia of Gypsies in order to prevent them from reproducing.
Rozenkier claims he lost his mother, father, four sisters, and a brother in the Holocaust.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/19/nyregion/19SURV.html
Article #1: The New York Times: "Survivor of Nazi Experiments Says $8,000 Isn’t Enough"
More on Simon, from his obituary:
The Nazis told him "These shots will give you muscles to work. Do you understand that, you redheaded dog?"
He said the sterilization shots "caused his genitalia to swell and bleed and caused wrenching pain for days."
Before being taken to a concentration camp, Simon escaped the ghetto in his native Poland and slept in a cemetery next to an aunt's grave for several months.
At Auschwitz, Simon says he was spared from the gas chamber "because the Nazi doctors thought he had unusual genes" and "were trying to figure out why this Jew got red hair."
Of Mengele, he says "sometimes he gave people a piece of chocolate, and the next minute he shoots them in the head."
Simon says he personally saw a hunchback who's hump had been cut off by Dr. Mengele, and that Mengele threw a man into a bath of ice and let him freeze to death.
He also says he saw Nazi doctors administer X-rays to the genitalia of Gypsies in order to prevent them from reproducing.
Rozenkier claims he lost his mother, father, four sisters, and a brother in the Holocaust.
Simon Rozenkier,
third from left in a dark cap, on the day the
Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated in 1945.
[1]
Survivor of Nazi Experiments Says $8,000 Isn’t Enough
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
Published: November 19, 2003
The medical experiments that Simon Rozenkier says he saw and experienced in Nazi concentration camps strain the imagination.
He saw a hunchback whose hump had been cut off by Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor. He said Dr. Mengele had thrown a Jewish man into a bath of ice and let him freeze to death, in a study intended to help Nazi pilots survive when they were shot down over icy seas.
Mr. Rozenkier, a native of Poland who emigrated to New York in 1947, said he saw Nazi doctors administer intense X-rays to the genitalia of Jews and Gypsies to sterilize them. And he vividly recalled how a Nazi doctor, Horst Schumann, had repeatedly injected him with chemicals — he was told they were vitamin supplements — to sterilize him, all part of a Nazi effort to perfect ways to keep Jews from reproducing.
"They told me, `These shots will give you muscles to work,' " he said. " `Do you understand that, you redheaded dog?'"
When Mr. Rozenkier and his wife encountered problems having children in the early 1950's, he contacted the German consulate in New York. Officials there sent him to a doctor who determined that he was sterile, confirming his own doctor's findings.
This year, Mr. Rozenkier filed a lawsuit accusing two German pharmaceutical giants, Bayer and Schering, of providing experts and drugs to Dr. Mengele and other Nazi doctors for sterilizations.
"What they did to me is beyond right and wrong," said Mr. Rozenkier, who lost his parents and four siblings in the Holocaust. "They should be punished."
His lawsuit, in Federal District Court in Newark, has created a legal and diplomatic tempest because the German government and German companies insist that there is no place for such litigation now. They point to a 2000 agreement between the United States and Germany that created a $5 billion fund to compensate Nazi slave laborers and victims of medical experiments.
German officials and companies say the fund was created partly to prevent lawsuits like Mr. Rozenkier's, which are difficult to litigate and which embarrass the Germans with details about past Nazi horrors.
Mr. Rozenkier, who lives on Staten Island, said that his lawsuit was warranted despite the agreement because, in his view, the $8,000 that the fund awarded him was woefully inadequate. The lawsuit does not seek a specific amount. He further argued that the German foundation that administers the fund had violated the agreement by capping awards to the victims of medical experiments and not individually judging how much each victim should receive.
But Roger Witten, an American lawyer representing Bayer and Schering, said Mr. Rozenkier's lawsuit should be dismissed. "Everybody feels sympathy for the plaintiff here," Mr. Witten said. "These are all people who went through horrible things." But he said creation of the fund should have ended these cases in American courts.
In the agreement, the American government promised that in suits brought in federal court, it would urge the judge to dismiss the cases if there were valid legal reasons for doing so. The government would do so without taking a position on the merits of the complaints.
"The U.S. side embraced the idea of legal peace for German companies," Mr. Witten said. "This was not just in the interests of German companies and Germany, but also in the foreign policy interests of the United States for German companies to be able to put this behind them."
A State Department official said last week that the department would file a statement recommending that the judge in New Jersey dismiss the case if there were any valid legal grounds to do so.
Mr. Rozenkier's lawyer, Carey D'Avino, said, "The State Department apparently plans to file a statement with the court for diplomatic reasons, but the U.S. shouldn't file such a statement because the Germans have failed to live up to the letter and spirit of the agreement and failed to live up to their side of the bargain."
Experts on Holocaust claims disagree about how the federal courts should treat Mr. Rozenkier's case.
Stuart E. Eizenstat, a former deputy treasury secretary who had helped negotiate the agreement with Germany, said the suit should be dismissed. "If the plaintiff were correct in this case," he said, "it would undercut the entire thrust of the German settlement, which is to put an overall cap on claims, to create a quick claims mechanism and to avoid individualized hearings."
But Lawrence Kill, a New York lawyer who had signed the agreement after representing former slave laborers who sued Germany, said Mr. Rozenkier's case should be allowed to go forward because the Germans had apparently violated the agreement. "A side letter to the agreement called for individual consideration as to the amount medical victims are entitled to," Mr. Kill said. "How can we give someone who was subject to some of the worst kinds of atrocities imaginable the same as somebody else who might have had a toenail removed in a Nazi experiment?"
Mr. Rozenkier said the sterilization shots he had received caused his genitalia to swell and bleed and caused wrenching pain for days. The shots also caused a more lasting anguish. "After the war," he said, "when I finally got in touch with my brother, Aaron, who had escaped to Russia, he said: `I hope you're going to have a big family. Look what we lost.' I said, `O.K., we'll have a family.' But it never happened."
He pulled out an old picture of his brother as a lieutenant in the Soviet Army. Then, choking up, he showed a prewar picture of three primly dressed sisters and a brother, all under 12 at the time. All four died in the war.
After immigrating to New York, Mr. Rozenkier served in the Korean War, earning two Bronze Stars, and then spent 20 years working in Manhattan's garment district. After the war, he and his wife, Joan, were often invited to reunions of death camp survivors.
"I felt like a jackass," he said. "I'd go there, and they all had three or four kids and I didn't have any. I was walking around like an outcast."
Monographs by Nazi doctors and numerous books and treatises have described the sterilization work at labs run by Dr. Mengele and others. Chemicals were injected into the uterus of hundreds of Jewish and Gypsy women, causing blockages in their fallopian tubes that rendered them sterile. The Nazi doctors also X-rayed male inmates to sterilize them, but the X-rays often killed the men or caused such severe burns that they became unfit for work. Mr. Rozenkier said that this must have led the Nazis to begin experimenting with chemical sterilization on men.
Mr. Rozenkier was one of several thousand victims who survived the experiments. "Certainly there was widespread sterilization and castration, and all this was part of a distorted racial vision that sought to destroy the capacity to reproduce in ostensibly inferior races and especially Jews," said Robert Jay Lifton, author of "The Nazi Doctors." Mr. Rozenkier was born in Wroclawek, Poland, 75 years ago. In September 1939, soon after Hitler invaded Poland, German soldiers pounded on his family's apartment door to arrest Mr. Rozenkier's father. When his oldest sister, Helena, stepped outside to protest, a soldier shot her to death.
Wroclawek's Jews were sent to a ghetto on the outskirts of town. Mr. Rozenkier escaped, and for several months slept in a cemetery next to an aunt's grave.
He was arrested when he was 14 and sent to a work camp. There, he loaded sand, nearly died of typhus and was eventually assigned the job of carting away hundreds of Jews who had died of typhus.
One day while transporting the dead he visited a Polish family to beg for potatoes. German soldiers seized him and planned to hang him, but he was spared because the commander of a nearby women's work camp put in a good word for him. Breaking into tears, he said: "My sister, Leah, worked for that commander. She was his cook. But she sold her body to him to save my life."
After more than a year in work camps, he was shipped to Auschwitz in a crammed cattle car. He was tattooed with the number 143511 and assigned to a nearby work camp that made synthetic rubber. One day, an associate of Dr. Mengele saw him and had him sent to the nearby Birkenau camp for experiments.
With reddish-blond hair that made him look less Jewish, Mr. Rozenkier said, he was spared from the gas chamber because the Nazi doctors thought he had unusual genes. He said, "They were trying to figure out why this Jew got red hair."
At Birkenau, while many were starving around him, Mr. Rozenkier was fed an ample diet of buckwheat to help him survive the experiments.
"Sometimes they even gave us chocolate — can you believe it? Chocolate," he said.
"Mengele didn't give a damn if I live or die," he continued. "Sometimes he gave people a piece of chocolate, and the next minute he shoots them in the head."
After Mr. Rozenkier survived the sterilization shots, a doctor who took a liking to him arranged for him to work in a coal mine. From there, he joined the infamous death march to Buchenwald in which the Nazis shot hundreds of stragglers. He was in Buchenwald when American troops liberated it.
Had he known that he was sterile, he said: "I never would have married my wife. It's not fair to her. She's entitled to have children." They adopted a daughter, Allison, who is now 35.
Mr. Rozenkier is seeking money from Schering and Bayer, which was then a division of I. G. Farben, because records show that doctors from Schering participated in the sterilization work at Birkenau and other camps, while drugs Bayer developed were used in sterilizations. His lawsuit also wants the companies to disclose which chemicals were injected into him.
In his eyes, the lawsuit is a way to achieve justice. He says he will donate any money he wins to Israel.
Like many Holocaust survivors, Mr. Rozenkier feels uneasy that he lived while so many family members and other Jews perished. "I'm the only one who suffers right now because I should have been with them," he said. "I feel guilty."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/19/nyregion/19SURV.html
Article #1: The New York Times: "Survivor of Nazi Experiments Says $8,000 Isn’t Enough"
More on Simon, from his obituary:
Simon Rozenkier, 83
By Maureen Donnelly
SILive.com
May 24, 2009, 5:14AM
Holocaust survivor believed in people
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Simon Rozenkier, a boy who survived the Holocaust, became a man who -- against odds -- believed in people.
Nabbed as a starving teen-ager for accepting a potato from a stranger in his native Poland, he became a man who regularly distributed potatoes (and other staples, from paper towels to cherry pie), to his Charleston neighbors.
Simon Rozenkier, who was sterilized at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Josef Mengele's infamous lab, adopted a daughter to become a loving father and a devoted grandfather.
Mr. Rozenkier died Friday at Staten Island University Hospital, Ocean Breeze. He was 83.
He was born in Wroclawek, Poland, during an era that destined him to a sickening adolescence. He spoke about it nearly every day, his daughter said.
Mr. Rozenkier was 11 when Adolf Hitler's troops invaded his town. As the Gestapo approached his home, a voice outside screamed in Yiddish, "God help us!" Minutes later, soldiers found him and his family hiding in candlelight. They struck his father with a gun, sent him falling down a flight of stairs, then shot dead his eldest sister, Helene Rozenkier, who had grabbed in protest for their machine gun.
SENT TO A GHETTO
Shipped to a Jewish ghetto, he was captured after more than a year in hiding and sent to a German labor camp, where he dug pits for the bodies of Jews -- some 100,000 of them, he estimated-- who had died of typhus.
In 1942, the Gestapo discovered him accepting a potato from a Polish woman whose husband had been killed. They bound his hands with wire.
The following year, at 17, he arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Intrigued by his fair skin, blue eyes and light, red hair, Nazis sent Mr. Rozenkier to the "zoo camp," the laboratory where Mengele conducted diabolic medical experiments.
One of thousands of Jews sterilized there as part of efforts to "purify" the Aryan race, Mr. Rozenkier wrote in a published essay: "I cannot describe the pain and bleeding and suffering. I had no idea what they were doing. ... I was their guinea pig."
After working in the coal mines of Auschwitz and being forced to walk for 20 straight days on the "death march" to the Buchenwald concentration camp, Mr. Rozenkier was rescued by the Allies a year later.
"I was thinking about myself and about my family, if I'm ever going see them," Mr. Rozenkier said in a testimony recorded by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "I says, you know, 'I hope you're alive and I'm coming to see you.' To my mother I was talking. 'I don't know what's going to happen to me, I don't know if I'm ever going to see you again, because all my friends are not coming back.' Tears, you just cry and cry and cry. Family was dear to me, I don't know if I ever going to see them. And I didn't, none of them."
MOST OF FAMILY KILLED
Mr. Rozenkier's mother, father, four sisters, and a brother died in the Shoah; his two brothers who survived the Holocaust died some decades later.
Mr. Rozenkier, who immigrated to the United States at the age of 21, discovered he was sterile when he and his wife, Joan, married in 1953 and tried to start a family.
Over that, he waged a long battle for restitution -- beyond the roughly $700 monthly pension that victims of Nazi persecution have been receiving since shortly after the war.
Mr. Rozenkier refused to accept a check that arrived at his Charleston home: $5,348.36 from the German government that no one pretended would counterbalance his losses.
That strange sum was the flat-rate slice of a $5 billion fund set up in 2000 for hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims, the result of a deal struck by the United States and German governments in exchange for an end to an overwhelming torrent of lawsuits, the Advance reported.
Mr. Rozenkier subsequently brought a failed lawsuit against Bayer AG and Schering AG seeking compensation for the medical experiments he endured.
Shortly after immigrating to Brooklyn, Mr. Rosenkier was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army. He served as a sergeant in the Korean War from 1950 to 1952.
In 1999, he relocated to Charleston.
For many years, Mr. Rozenkier worked in the garment district as a wholesaler and retailer of women's clothing.
Mr. Rozenkier spoke very openly, every day, about the atrocities that he survived.
They shaped his personality, his daughter said, as a charitable, loving person who never took anything for granted.
"He realized life can be over within a minute," said his daughter, Allison Rozenkier-Larson.
While he suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Mr. Rozenkier retained his trust in people.
"He had a way of talking about the most horrible things. He would have this laugh at the end of his stories. It was just a coping mechanism. That's how he got through it," said Ms. Rozenkier-Larson.
He also was exceptionally generous, giving to charities that supported animals and children. He would come home from the grocery store with "extras" for his family and neighbors. He would ring neighborhood doorbells with odd gifts of fruit, potatoes or paper towels -- an ethic that may have been borne of sharing bread in the camps, his daughter said.
And above all, he adored his grandchildren.
Mr. Rozenkier, who spoke to students at Wagner College a few years ago and was very involved with the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., wrote a memoir that his family hopes to have published by the fall.
The feisty survivor wore a shock of dyed red hair.
Surviving Mr. Rozenkier are his wife of 56 years, Joan; his daughter, Allison, and his three grandchildren.
The funeral was scheduled to take place this morning from Menorah Chapels, New Springville, followed by entombment at Beth Israel Cemetery in Woodbridge, N.J.
Article #2: "Simon Rozenkier, 83: Holocaust survivor believed in people"
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