Holocaust survivor Nate Leipciger speaks in Warman, Saskatchewan

[Main Gate at Birkenau (circa 1945)]

Creeden Martell, Saskatoon StarPhoenix:
    A man who survived a concentration camp during the Holocaust shared his experience with students in Warman.
Nate Leipciger, who has been speaking for 40 years, described the atrocities of war committed by the Nazis against Jews, Italians, political prisoners of war, homosexuals and his own family to a silent gymnasium of staff and 750 students on Thursday.
   “We were confined to the barracks (in Auschwitz II, Birkenau),” Leipciger said of his most traumatic memory, which took place on Yom Kippur in 1943. “The Nazis decided to play God. … I saw something I wish I never saw. I saw naked women being transported to the gas chamber. That was a very traumatic moment. Because years later, I found out that among those women were my sister and my mother.”
   Leipciger described the Nazis invading Poland and closing Jewish schools when he was 11. He lived in a ghetto for four years. There, ghetto prisoners would hide every time the Nazis came by to send people to the camps.
   Leipciger told the story of a woman and her child who were denied entrance to a hiding place. He said the woman refused to leave and the people inside let her and the child in with them. The Nazis later declared the hiding spot clear, but when the woman emerged, crying, her baby was dead. The infant had been suffocated.
   “When you see people die, you don’t get used to it. Every human being that dies is a new trauma. Every single human being is a life. It’s not a number, like my number on my arm,” Leipciger said...Continue reading...