Holocaust: Jack Marcus

From USA Today:
"Holocaust survivor told story to thousands of students"

Jack Marcus could have died on the day in 1939 when the Nazis rounded up all the Jews in his hometown in Poland and executed everyone. He could have died as a prisoner at Auschwitz or Dachau, or he could have lost his life on a death march in the ending months of World War II, his photo snapped by a passerby and printed decades later in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. But Marcus was a survivor — one of the few Jews still alive in Europe at the end of the war — and he dedicated his life to telling others his story.  "He went from being afraid of being caught by the Nazis to feeling very committed to the world knowing this story," said his son, Leonard Marcus.

Marcus, 93, died Tuesday in Milwaukee. Before he was Jack Marcus, he was Prisoner 144346. And before his left forearm was tattooed by the Nazis, he was Itzek Markowski, a boy growing up in the small town of Radziejow, northwest of Warsaw. On the day German soldiers came, his mother gave him a small bag of food and told him to flee. Marcus initially refused but relented at his mother's insistence. "You can imagine how painful it was for her to push her only son out, but she wanted him to have a future," said Leonard Marcus. An only child, 15-year-old Marcus hid in a haystack. His parents and the rest of the Jews in his town were loaded into specially outfitted trucks with engine exhaust piped into the back. They were driven around until everyone was asphyxiated. They were buried in a mass grave.  Marcus realized the only way to survive was to work, so he went to a labor camp in Poland. When the Nazis built the giant camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Marcus was sent to work there. One day while working in a steel plant, a heavy girder fell on his foot. Marcus was taken to the camp hospital where one of his toes was amputated.  "Ten days in, the doctor came to him and said you only get 14 days in the hospital. If you're still here after 14 days, they come and take you to the crematoria," Leonard Marcus said. Marcus went back to work, hobbling 2 miles each day from his spartan living quarters to the work site, eating a bowl of weak soup in the morning and evening and a piece of bread at noon.  One morning, Marcus was walking to work when he saw his uncle arriving at Auschwitz. He was thrilled to see his uncle from afar and later that day excitedly searched for him in his quarters. To his horror, he found only his uncle's clothes and Marcus knew his uncle had been gassed immediately upon arrival.  As the war was winding down in the winter of 1945, Marcus and hundreds of other laborers from Auschwitz were put on an open coal train and spent days traveling from Poland to Germany with no food or shelter from the brutal cold. The train stopped occasionally, and bodies of people who died from the cold and starvation were tossed off. One day Marcus saw a shivering boy ask a Nazi guard if he could get a coat from the body of one of the dead men thrown from the train. "My dad watched this young boy jump off the train and get a coat from a pile of bodies. A soldier went up to him and shot him in the back. My dad said, 'That's when I gave up hope,' " Leonard Marcus said.  Later, when the train stopped in another town, someone threw a loaf of bread at Marcus' train car. But the bread fell on the tracks. He knew if he jumped off to get the bread he would be killed, his son said. But by then he no longer cared. He threw the loaf up to the people in his train car. Instead of killing Marcus, a guard beat him and told him to get back on the train. The bread was gone by the time he clambered aboard, but Marcus told his son he got something else. He got his humanity back. At the end of the war, Marcus was fed by American soldiers and in return he gave them caps he made after teaching himself to be a tailor. He eventually immigrated to Milwaukee in 1950 where his cousins introduced Marcus to a young woman whose family had fled his same hometown before the war. Two months after they met, Marcus married Marlene and they were married 66 years until her death last month. He worked as a tailor and clothing cutter in Milwaukee. After he retired, he began speaking at schools about his experiences.  "Once he retired, he stepped back and looked at his whole life and knew it was his obligation to make sure future generations knew what happened. He saw more death than any of us can imagine," said his son. In addition to his son, Marcus is survived by daughter Sharon Lerman and grandchildren. 

^ He recently passed, but his story is still very interesting and horrible at the same time. ^


http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/01/26/holocaust-survivor-told-story-thousands-students/97075714/