The strength not to hate

Felix Lazar survived Auschwitz and Nazi torture, yet says his story is secondary to what he still preaches: tolerance.

[Times photo: James Borchuck]

Felix Lazar was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp in a crowded boxcar similar to this one at the Florida Holocaust Museum. "You only had room to stand," Lazar says. "There were no facilities, no food, no water."

[Photos courtesy of Felix Lazar]

Felix Lazar as a boy in 1929.

Felix Lazar as a young man in the Dutch army in 1937.

ST. PETERSBURG - Even in the worst of it, when Gestapo interrogators stubbed out cigarettes on his back, when he was jammed into a boxcar bound for Auschwitz, when starvation made him a walking skeleton, Felix Lazar held on.

"I was determined to survive," he says. "How, I did not know. You survive because you want to survive. And I always had faith I would."

The memories are 60 years old now, but they are seared into his mind, like the faded green digits "175288" tattooed on his left forearm.

He is 85. Lives in a quiet northeast St. Petersburg neighborhood. Loves to gamble at the Seminole Casino with his wife, Clare. Plays snooker in Tampa. Dresses sharp. Still walks with a forthright stride.

He stands just a bit shorter than his 6-foot height as a younger man - the strapping Dutch national who joined the Netherlands' underground to blow up bridges and Nazi transports. Who once escaped from German captors, then assumed a fake identity to sabotage a weapons factory within Germany. Who survived a notorious death camp.

Who fought back.

On a recent morning, Lazar steps off the third-floor elevator of the Florida Holocaust Museum and scans the lecture room. It is filled with busloads of high school students on a morning field trip.

Lazar has addressed children here more times than he can recall in the past five years. A docent recognizes him instantly: "Are you speaking, Felix?"

"Just visiting," he whispers with a smile.

On this morning, he has come to tell his story to a reporter. It is a story deeply ingrained in the spirit of Yom HaShoah, the Day of Remembrance, a commemoration of those who perished or struggled in the Holocaust. On this year's Hebrew calendar, it is officially marked today.

"I speak now to thousands of school kids," says Lazar. "I never have enough time. But the main thing I feel is important is not my story as such. But the fact that in spite of what happened to me, I still can preach tolerance rather than hate. That is my message."

He was born Felix David Eliazar in 1917, the only boy in a middle-class Jewish family in Rotterdam, with one older sister and one younger. Lazar's father imported furniture, and childhood years were happy. He attended college, served a year in the Dutch army and then joined his father in the furniture business.

Lazar rejoined the Army in 1939, with the Nazis on the verge of invading the Netherlands. But Dutch forces were no match when Germany attacked in the spring of 1940. Lazar and thousands of soldiers surrendered their weapons and went home.

But the fight was just starting.

"Holland got mad," Lazar says. "People became very angry at the invaders. But the young ones like me were able to do things. I was single. So a friend and I looked for a group to join and become what we called freedom fighters. Our goal was to do as much damage as possible to the Nazis."

Lazar's family went into hiding while he brought them supplies and news. At night, the freedom fighters lifted papers of deceased Dutch citizens from public offices to create false identification and passports. They moved railroad tracks to derail Nazi trains, detonated bombs at key crossings, damaged German vehicles. And inevitably, they got caught.

"I was sent to a jail in the Hague," says Lazar. "But my fortune was that it was a Sunday. On Sunday, the offices weren't open. So they took my fingerprints and mug shot, but had to wait a day to question me."

What's more, the prison was still run by the Dutch. That night, guards awakened Lazar in his cell, led him to a ground-floor bathroom with an unlocked window and handed him his clothes.

He sneaked through the darkness, finding his way to Amsterdam. There, he located a resistance contact named Mims Querido, a German-born Catholic woman married to a Portuguese Jew. He could no longer safely remain in the Netherlands. So Querido gave him an ID obtained by the underground.

"I became Olaf Metzelaar," he says. "And Olaf Metzelaar was about to volunteer to become a laborer for the German government."

With his new personal history - born in the Netherlands East Indies and son of a retired Dutch clerk - Lazar traveled to the German town of Mainz.

He had heard that many young German men and woman had been sent to the front lines. As a result, Germany had relaxed its rules against hiring laborers from occupied countries. So Lazar went to Germany, planning to become a saboteur. He easily landed a job in an understaffed factory, which made slides for the V-2 rockets to be launched at England.

"It sounds crazy, doesn't it?" he says. "Well, I - or Olaf - was hired to be a welder of the slides needed to get these rockets over the North Sea to get to England. There was another man like me in this factory. And we worked hard at being the lousiest welders we could be, making sure the welds were very, very weak. That way, the slides would fall apart as soon as the rockets were fired."

At the same time, Lazar and the fellow Dutchman started writing and distributing an underground pamphlet called the Locomotive, similar to one that had circulated in the Netherlands. It was high-risk work. One day, just before Christmas 1943, Lazar received a tap on the shoulder in the factory. He was taken to Gestapo headquarters in Frankfurt.

"The SS is bad, the Gestapo is worse," he says. "They started interrogating me and thought they had caught a very important spy. But we had our instructions that if caught, you tell only a little, so they think you know more. You give them a little to stay alive."

The Gestapo captor started off friendly, offering him a smoke. Then, he reeled off Lazar's background. Lazar first thought his pamphlet had been his undoing. He later learned that Querido had been captured along with records of his fake identity.

Pretending to hold back key information had a price. Lazar's interrogator jammed lit cigarettes on his back and legs. "I kept saying to myself, "They can harm you physically, but mentally they can't touch you. I am stronger and I am better than them.'

"And for some idiot reason, it worked to the point where they couldn't go any further. So they decided to send me to a camp near Frankfurt where prisoners were "taught' to be good workers in the Reich."

Guard dogs routinely bit the prisoners as they performed grueling labor. Food consisted of stale bread and lukewarm water with potato skins. The only bright spot came when captured Allied pilots behind another fence would throw chocolate and other Red Cross rations to the prisoners.

"The guards who were German, but not Nazis, would turn away on purpose so we could pick up whatever we could," he says.

Shortly after arriving, errant Allied bombs struck the camp, leveling the barbed-wire fence. Lazar and 200 of the prisoners made a break for freedom, but guards shouted over speakers to halt, that the last three to return would be shot.

Lazar and the others scrambled back to the camp.

"We had to stand in the courtyard and watch this guard shoot three guys in their head, dead," he says. "It was the first time I ever saw something like that."

Lazar pauses, then takes a breath.

"You have no idea what that does to you."

With no explanation, after five weeks, the prisoners were released, their punishment supposedly complete. But not Lazar: He was promptly rearrested for being a Jew in Germany.

"Germany by now was Judenfrei - free of all Jews - so I was put in prison to await the next transport," he says. "I only had my clothes from the camp, and just rags to wrap around my feet. That's how I was put on the train: destination Auschwitz."

The trip normally took two to three days; this one lasted a week on slow side-rails to make room for Nazi trains.

"It was the worst experience of all," he says. "I was in a boxcar with about 100 people. You only had room to stand. There were no facilities, no food, no water. And there were all these completely desperate people. There was no way to tell them that there was a way to survive; that if you work, you have a chance.

"So I stayed to myself, and as close to the door as I could. That's how I could get a little fresh air, because the stench was terrible."

Lazar looked at himself as a trained prisoner by now. Upon arriving at Auschwitz, he and about 50 others with strength to leave the train by themselves were sent to a table. As his forearm was tattooed, Lazar made a point of looking around. "I knew the more I can find out, the better off I am," he says.

He quickly saw that able-bodied males were sent to their own line. So he stood as straight as possible, and when the time came, he was sent there, too.

The fitter males were placed in a barracks together. They were constantly beaten and belittled. But each morning, Lazar noticed that guards would select certain prisoners for work detail. He wanted to prove he could work: "So one morning, I threw my chest out and smiled, and they picked me."

Eleven workers were taken to a Polish mining camp called Jawichowitz. The commandant greeted them with a speech: they would be well-fed, receive blankets, clothes. Unless they didn't do as they were told. With that, he removed his jacket, grabbed a whip and began to beat each prisoner viciously.

"I already had the cigarette scars on my back, and he beat the hell out of me," Lazar says. "He did it because I was taller than he was. But if you take it without a word, they'll stop, because they have respect for people like that. It happened a number of times later. As long as you didn't react, they stopped."

It was 1944. In the midst of Poland's freezing winter, the prisoners walked with rags on their feet on rocky roads. But they pushed themselves to keep moving. Anyone who wasn't useful would be shot, replaced by a new prisoner.

Then, one day, Lazar fell in a mine and cut his hand on a rusty rail. By nightfall, the hand had swollen to twice its size with infection. If he couldn't work, he would be killed.

A fellow prisoner, a young medical student from Prague, saved his life with a simple instrument: a spoon handle sharpened by prisoners for a knife.

He made two incisions in Lazar's hand and drained the wound. The pain was excruciating. The man then took some coal dust - which contained a medicinal element that acted as an antibiotic - and spread it over the wound. Lazar and others chewed on cement bags to make them pliable, then stripped them into bandages.

So Lazar kept working, draining his bad hand each night. Gradually it healed. By the summer of 1944, he spent days in the mines and nights in a kitchen job. He knew the job would allow him to find scraps of cheese and salami and bread.

Fall arrived. The younger German guards were suddenly gone, shipped off to the front and replaced by older guards. "I mean, guys 60 and older, who were not Nazis," Lazar says. "So things got a little better. And then we started hearing rumblings."

It was the distant sound of cannon fire from Russian troops advancing on the Nazis.

"Our hopes were so high," Lazar recalls. "And I said, "I'm going to survive this damn thing."'

On Jan. 10, 1945, the camp gates were left open.

There were no guards to be seen. But Lazar and his fellow prisoners were weak and emaciated. He weighed roughly 90 pounds. So they stayed in their barracks. "It was too much of a shock, and we could barely lift our legs to walk," he says.

Russian troops that arrived also were shocked.

"They didn't know what they were looking at: They saw human beings that were just bones," Lazar says. "So they shared their lunch with us - a bowl of thick corn they mixed with vodka. We human skeletons had no resistance whatsoever, so we immediately were drunk as skunks and passed out."

They were taken to a field hospital in Krakow run by the Russians. Lazar learned that his doctors had studied French textbooks. French was one of the four languages he spoke fluently. They liked him, called him "Hollandski," gave him especially good care.

In a month, he had regained his strength. In fact, his Russian rescuers invited him to drive a transport truck. With nowhere else to go, Lazar agreed, and for several months wore a Russian Army uniform.

On one outing, his convoy captured a group of Nazis. The Russian commander summoned Lazar, and invited him to exact some revenge. But Lazar declined. "It would have made me no better than they were," he says.

Soon, he began to feel restless. He met an English officer who turned him over to the English Red Cross. Lazar caught a freighter from Odessa to Greece and Italy, then to France. From there, he began the trip back to the Netherlands to finally reunite with his family.

He went home. But there was no family.

His parents and sisters, 62 relatives and friends, had all died in concentration camps.

"Don't ask me what I did when I found out," he says. "Because to this day, I don't remember."

He swallows and pauses again.

"So that's the story."

Lazar tells it not only to students.

He told it as part of Steven Spielberg's Shoah project. He told it in a short, self-published autobiography, with portions of sales devoted to the Florida Holocaust Museum.

He tells it to juvenile offenders at Pinellas County boot camps. He shows them the scars on his back. They listen.

"I try to show them there is always a chance in life," he says. "Even if you're in the worst of conditions. If you have faith, you have a chance."

In the years after the war, Lazar married a Dutch woman and had two sons. In 1954, they emigrated to the United States. In 1959, he became a U.S. citizen, changing his surname Eliazar to Lazar.

The marriage didn't last. In 1963, after moving to St. Petersburg to be near relatives, he fell in love and married Clare, who had four children of her own.

She worked in banking, he in the wine wholesale business. They are now great-grandparents and recently celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary.

And several times a month, he steps off the museum elevator to face a new group of kids, and to give them something to remember about survival.

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