From a Name to a Number

Today I met a holocaust survivor at school named Alter Wiener. He has a book called From a Name to a Number, (Amazon link below) which tells his life story. He talks about all the horrors that go on in a concentration camp and about how he was transferred from camp to camp. He talked about running with his mother and two brothers from they're town to try and escape the Germans and then finding out that where they were fleeing to was already occupied by Germans. he and his mother and brothers returned to they're town and found they re own father half decomposed in a ditch and then his brother was carried off into a concentration camp, soon after that he was as well. He stayed in that camp for a little over 2 months and then he was transferred to another camp to build a highway. After that he was transferred again to another work camp near a work site for German women, he talked about how one woman risked he own life thirty different times just to give him a sandwich. her workplace had signs up all around saying things like "If you look one of the prisoners in the eye you will be executed" yet she gave him food.

After being relocated to another camp to build warehouses for the Nazis Russians liberated the camps and allowed the Jews three days to hunt Germans for revenge, Alter Wiener was too young to go hunting and the Russians had no food for the prisoners, many of them died but he survived and returned to Poland to find his family. Sadly after all he went through he found out his entire immediate family was dead (around 140 people) and all of his friends. However he didn't know if his brother was dead or not because he never heard about him until recently, a man approached him at a holocaust survivors of Oregon meeting and he said he worked for his father and at a work camp he had to throw Alter Wiener's brother into a furnace to dispose of the body, so after that he knew the fate of his family.

Now he is eighty two years old and he has a wife and children. Warner Pacific College gave him an honorary degree for speaking there and all the things he had to go through both physically and emotionally. He has now given his testimony at over four hundred and seventy places and his main points are that racism and sexism don't make any since and that no matter what group of people someone is in they still have good in they're hearts.


This is the Amazon link for his book:
http://www.amazon.com/Name-Number-Holocaust-Survivors-Autobiography/dp/1425997406