Holocaust survivor recounts Nazi-perpetrated horrors

• Polish-born Jew lost family and endured agonies as a youth

By Jennifer Toomer-Cook

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Deseret Morning News

deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,605154420,00.html

SOUTH JORDAN — A baby survived its mother’s murder in the Nazi showers. David Faber, a teenager imprisoned at the concentration camp, found it, still suckling, as he pried open its gassed mother’s cold embrace.

The Jewish boy was carrying out Nazi orders to collect gold teeth and any other valuables from the dead. As he unlaced the woman’s fingers, her baby cried out.

Faber and another man wanted to save the infant. They tried to secret it to the women in the camp.

They got caught.

The Nazis led Faber and the infant to the ovens.

They threw the baby into the flames.

They bound and beat Faber until he lost his voice counting the lashes.

The man with him was murdered.

“There were many tortures, every day,” the impassioned Faber recalled Tuesday for South Jordan Middle School students, who sat silent and teary-eyed at the detail.

“But I survived,” he told them. “I survived.”

[…]

His videotaped testimony is preserved at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and at the Museum of Tolerance and the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, both in Los Angeles.

His book, “Because of Romek: A Holocaust Survivor’s Memoir,” is required reading in some middle and high schools and a class at University of California, San Diego. […]

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