“When we arrived in Auschwitz, 30 to 40 percent of the people were dead on the train. Whoever could walk out of the train walked out, and we were lined up in rows of five. That is where I met…
In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Dolores Huerta Middle School in Burbank invited six Holocaust survivors on Wednesday, April 27 to speak to students via zoom, and Joseph Alexander, a spry 99-year-old retired tailor who still drives and climbs ladders, recounted his six years in 12 Nazi concentration camps in Poland and Germany.
He was just 16 in 1939, and worked with his father at his father’s clothing manufacturing and distributing business in Kowal, Poland when the Nazis invaded their country. They fled from their two-story six-room home to the Jewish ghetto, but his father later bribed a guard to let him and one of his sisters return home. The two siblings were free for three days before they were caught and sent to the camps.
Joe, as he likes to be called, is a special person. “He is extremely resourceful, and nothing will stop him,” said Reeva Sherman, his girlfriend, many years his junior. “He is wired differently than anyone I have ever met. He is always happy, grateful, positive, kind, and generous. He never holds a grudge, but he forgives and moves forward.”
“People were dying in the cars; when we arrived in Auschwitz, 30 to 40 percent of the people were dead on the train. Whoever could walk out of the train walked out, and we were lined up in rows of five. That is where I met Dr. Josef Mengele. He selected people that could not walk to the camp and sent them to the left, and they were to be taken on trucks. He went through and picked out old people, sick people, and young kids, and he picked me out too to go to the left.
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