Holocaust History, as Told by a Survivor
EMSDETTEN, Germany — LASZLO SCHWARTZ never had a proper adolescence. The Nazis made sure of that.
He was 14 when he and his family disembarked from a cold boxcar onto the selection ramp at Auschwitz, and he says he still remembers the feel of Josef Mengele’s wide leather gloves pinching his scrawny biceps.
As the sadistic concentration camp physician known as the “Angel of Death” sized up the teenage Laszlo, ordering him to line up with the other children, a sinister flame rose in the distance, he said.
“I knew what they were doing, but I didn’t want to believe it,” Mr. Schwartz recently told a class of 50 high school students in this small town in western Germany. “My turn came for Mengele, and he asked me to make a muscle. He asked how old I am. I said 17. It didn’t help.”
At 83, Mr. Schwartz splits his time between Germany and New York City, where he emigrated in 1946. Since July 2010, he has spoken at more than 80 schools around Germany about the kidnappings, starvation and torture he endured during the war and how the last time he ever saw his mother and sister was the day he met Mengele.
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