Nazi camp survivors face tragedy

OSWIECIM, Poland — Looking in the direction of where the crematorium once stood, Auschwitz death camp survivor Yitzhak Pery recalled Nazi guards telling him that the thick, black smoke rising from the chimney was from his mother's incinerated body.

"I remember it like it happened yesterday, not 60 years ago," he said.

Pery spent eight months in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Returning for the first time since the war, his eyes moist when he shared his experiences with his grandson, Shahar, a paratrooper in the Israeli army.

The 75-year-old Pery revisited the place of unspeakable suffering in a group of 20 survivors, who compared tattoos etched by the Nazis into their forearms and took their grandchildren — many in Israeli army uniform — to the ramp where Josef Mengele chose who would live and who would die.

Warned on the train about Mengele's selection, Pery feared being sent to the right — death in the gas chambers. By lying and saying he was 19 — considered prime working age by the Nazis — the 14-year-old Pery survived. But Mengele sent Pery's mother and sister to their death.

Pery said those who survived selection had their heads sprayed with kerosene and DDT against lice.

Long-suppressed memories rushed to the surface as the survivors, part of an annual memorial mission led this year by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, trudged through the thick mud and wet grass of what was once the Nazi's largest death camp. For some, it was the first trip back since they were freed 60 years ago, in May 1945.

Mixed with memories of extreme brutality and death were reminders — incongruous perhaps — that life goes on.

Some women in the group interrupted their painful journey to have pictures taken with German-born actor Eric Braeden, star of the U.S. TV soap opera "The Young and the Restless" and an activist for mending German-Jewish relations.

The grandchildren suddenly found themselves flashing pictures of their grandmothers embracing Braeden, in front of Auschwitz's forbidding brick buildings and the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" slogan etched above the camp's wrought-iron portal as a backdrop.

The survivors returned to Auschwitz Thursday for the annual March of the Living, a two-mile trek from Auschwitz to the Birkenau part of the complex, a counterpoint to the Nazis' death marches of emaciated camp inmates in the final days of World War II.