Survivor Who Testified Against Nazi-Commander Eichmann Dies At 91
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
(Worthy News) – Joseph Zalman Kleinman, who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp and later testified at the trial of Nazi commander Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, has died. The Holocaust survivor was 91.
The cause of death was not immediately released. Kleinman was one of fewer than 180,000 remaining Holocaust survivors in Israel.
Kleinman was born in what is now Slovakia in January 1930 and was deported from Budapest by Nazi Germany to Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland at the age of 14.
His father, mother, and sister were killed at Auschwitz, one of the most notorious Nazi death camps in occupied Poland.
Some six million Jews died in the Holocaust, or Shoah, many of them in Auschwitz.
Eichmann, one of Nazi Germany’s main organizers of the Holocaust, was captured by Israeli Mossad agents outside Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1960.
JERUSALEM TRIAL
He was put on trial in Jerusalem in 1961 and found guilty of crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, and war crimes.
Eichmann was executed the following year.
Kleinman was one of 110 witnesses at the 1961 trial of Eichmann, and at 31, was the youngest, according to records. His testimony, delivered just after another witness fainted, was about the fate of Jewish youths at Auschwitz.
During the trial against Eichmann, Kleinman told the court he avoided being executed by Josef Mengele, the Nazi officer, and physician known as “The Angel of Death.”
Kleinman recalled that “The Angel of Death” arrived at a soccer field on a bicycle with a measuring device. It became immediately clear to the youths gathered on the field that those who were shorter than the device’s measurements would die.
“Every one of us stood straight; each one of us sought an extra centimeter of height,” Kleinman explained. He immediately realized that he was not tall enough. His brother gave him pebbles to put in his shoes to get to the requisite height. Through some maneuvering, Kleinman remained with his brother in the line of those destined to slave labor.
“ENORMOUS TRAIN”
After his liberation by American forces from another concentration camp near Dachau, Germany, Kleinman said he rode “an enormous train, with two large locomotives pulling it, that started moving southwards” through Europe.
He later told archivists at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, about his memories. “At every train station, Italians would alight from the train, returning to homes they hadn’t seen in years,” he remembered.
“All the townspeople waited for this train with refreshments, here and there even a welcoming orchestra. Every station, people would get off, but for us Jews — no one was waiting for us.”
Kleinman immigrated to Israel following the war. He recently received his coronavirus vaccine shots voluntarily this year, saying he had seen too much disease during his time at Auschwitz and after.
Most of those he knew never returned home. “In the summer of 1944, 3,000 young men aged 14 to 16 were gathered at Auschwitz … in tough conditions, acute starvation,“ he recalled later.
“We were there the whole summer, and then at the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur and Simchat Torah (Jewish high holidays), nearly everyone was exterminated,” Kleinman added.
Kleinman was laid to rest Tuesday in Jerusalem.
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