Holocaust survivor leaves Hillel audience in awe with story of death camps

As tears ran down Holocaust survivor Philip Gans face, he described the moment when he first saw the American tanks coming to liberate Auschwitz – the same day his father died. Gans spoke about his traumatic survival of the Holocaust while a packed room listened intensely Wednesday in the Helene G. Hillel Center.\n“I think it is so important for people to hear his story because the time is coming where there are no more \nsurvivors, and it will just become history,” Hillel Executive Director Rabbi Sue Shifron said.\nGans now lives in Clearwater, Fla., and travels to tell his story so others can “remember the past to build \na future.”\nGans recounted his first visit back to Auschwitz, Poland in 1995. \n“I returned again in 2000, where I walked up the path my mother, grandmother and sister walked to the gas chambers, and that was the hardest part of all,” he said. \nGans, born in 1928, was only 15 years old when German Nazis arrested him. His father was a successful business owner and his mother was a seamstress. Once they found out the Nazi officers invaded and were looking for Jews, his family fled Amsterdam to go into hiding. However, he was eventually found and taken to slave labor camps where they separated his family. Arrival at the slave labor camp meant he was no longer Philip Gans, but prisoner number 139755. His grandmother, mother and sister were killed after getting off of the cattle trains, he said. The living conditions were so poor that prisoners lost an estimated six to nine pounds every week, he said. If a prisoner was too skinny to work, he was sent to the gas chamber. Liberated at age 17, he grew up without family and friends. He now tells people to go home and erase the word “hate” from their vocabulary. \nAudience members watched as Gans showed photos of his old home, the exact rooms he hid in, the families who smuggled him and the horrific death camps that changed his life.\n“I went to Poland a few summers ago, and I saw the camps firsthand,” said freshman Allison Shenker. “I think it’s really interesting to hear \nthe stories.”\nGans said it is important to remember the Holocaust, so that it will never happen again.\n“You are now a witness to a witness, because your children will never see a Holocaust survivor,” he said. “If you know something is being done wrong, speak up.”