Survivor tells students of Holocaust's horrors
Local resident was taken from loved ones at age 24
BY JESSICA SMITH Staff Writer

JESSICA SMITH Holocaust survivor Elisabeth Gelb talks with Old Bridge High School student Jessica Lupo during Gelb's visit to the school last week.

Note: This is the first of a two-part series on Elisabeth Gelb.

OLD BRIDGE — Despite the pain that still lingers in her heart, Elisabeth Gelb was willing to revisit the horrors she endured during the Holocaust in order to educate a younger generation.

"It's very hard, even after 63 years," said the Holocaust survivor and 40-year township resident.

Gelb visited the high school as part of student Jessica Lupo's project for her Conscience of Man course. Lupo's mom is employed as a companion and caretaker for Gelb, and helped to arrange her visit to the school.

While it is difficult for Gelb to harken back to the atrocities that took place in the concentration camps where she was held, as a survivor she wants to ensure that no one forgets or denies what occurred.

"Today, only 63 years later, some people want us to forget what happened to us," Gelb said. "Some are even saying the Holocaust never happened. It is just a Jewish story. Now you can tell everyone you know that the Holocaust did take place, because you met me, a survivor."

A group of about 30 students sat rapt as Gelb spoke of unspeakable memories that never left her, and likely will not soon leave them.

She encouraged the students to plumb the depths of their imaginations and really try to gain a sensory grasp on what it was like to be a concentration camp prisoner.

"I want you to take off your very comfortable shoes, and put on the wooden clogs we were given," Gelb said. "Take off your very nice clothes, and put on a long, itchy burlap garment over your whole naked body, and walk with me down this memory lane."

Born in Hungary, Gelb was captured by German soldiers and separated from all of her loved ones when she was 24 years old. Being packed into a cattle car to be transported to a concentration camp was only the first of many ways in which the Nazis would try to strip Gelb, and countless other Jews, of their humanity.

Upon arrival at the camp, she and others were stripped completely naked, their heads and pubic hair shaved. From there, the men and women were taken to separate buildings to await their fates.

"That was the last time I saw my husband," Gelb said. "He was frozen to death the day before the allies reached the camp in Wells, Austria. Twelve hundred young men were hosed down with ice-cold water and left out in the cold to freeze to death."

As the newly captured prisoners were appraised by Dr. Josef Mengele to determine who would be able-bodied for labor and who was expendable, other prisoners advised young mothers to pass off their young children to older women. Anyone considered too young or too old to be useful for work was soon killed.

Though some met their demise shortly after arriving at the camp, those whose lives were spared may have wished otherwise. Gelb's words painted an all-too-vivid image of the cruelty she and others were forced to suffer.

"I want you to imagine and feel the horror [of] when all the women, young and old, teenagers like you, standing naked ... and redfacedwhen the S.S. soldiers came in to look at us," Gelb said. "The budding beauties of our people, the young girls were taken to the S.S. brothel where they were tattooed on the forehead with the words 'Yuden Hure,' which means 'Jewish Whore.'"

The young women were then raped, time and time again, until they fell ill or became pregnant. When they were no longer of use to their captors, they were killed.

Young men were also taken to brothels and treated like objects, Gelb said.

For those whose bodies were violated, as well as the other prisoners, nothing could seem to cleanse them of the literal or figurative filth to which they were subjected. Covered in pervasive lice on the outside and painfully marred on the inside, even what might be a brief respite of bathing became one of the biggest terrors of all.

In an ice cold shower, the captured Jews were supplied with soap marked "RIF." Gelb did not know it when she first arrived, but soon found out that it was made from the body fat of those who were cremated. She spoke of the horror of knowing that, and knowing it could contain pieces of her own family members.

Gelb became one of many clothed in a roughly hewn striped dress, marked with a yellow star that was treated with phosphorus so that it glowed in the dark of night. Twice each day, the uniformed victims would stand helpless for the apel, or head count. The group was narrowed by eliminating those who the S.S. determined were not able workers. They were killed.

Luckily for Gelb, she was young enough for her life to be spared.

"We were herded again into a cattle railroad car, some straw on the floor, and without food and water," Gelb said. "Four days later, we arrived in Kivioli, a small town in Estonia."

Again, Gelb saw as good of fortune as could be expected under such grim circumstances. Instead of having to bear loads of stones on her shoulders to a mill that pressed the oil out of them along with others, her fluency in German afforded her the job of cleaning the laboratory there and helped in her survival throughout her yearlong ordeal.

"If you didn't understand the command that they gave you, they killed you," Gelb said. For three months, she worked in the laboratory, where she was protected from the outdoor elements and received scant, yet welcomed portions of food the engineers there would share with her.

During that time, some were facing much worse conditions. The prisoners were decreasing in numbers, as those whose health declined were forced to dig their own graves in the frigid wind among the teeming birches of the forest. Upon finishing the cruel task, they were shot and killed.

By August, the Russian army was advancing. The Jewish lagerfuhrer, or commander, a doctor from Warsaw, informed the surviving prisoners that they too would soon meet their demise. As witnesses to the killings that took place, the S.S. deemed that they knew too much, which could prove dangerous. The doctor and others took a stand.

"The brave men, against all odds, decided that they were going to die fighting," Gelb said. "'I wish you to live,' were the doctor's last words ... The good doctor and his friends died fighting."