Word: pisar
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...night before the train left, Pisar recalls, his mother had a premonition. Deliberating over how to dress him for the Journey, she instinctively realized that if he wore short pants he would be considered a child and would go with she and his sister. If he wore long pants, he would go with the men, whom the Nazis often kept alive as workers. She dressed him in long pants and by doing so saved his life. It was the first in a string of miraculous and intuitive acts that marked his path to survival. Pisar never saw his mother...
...second such event occurred shortly after his arrival at Muidanek, a camp which Pisar says is little known only because so few survived. One day during roll call, all tailors were told to remain standing at attention, while the others were ordered dispersed. "My intuition told me to stand still." Pisar remembers. "When the SS officer got to me he asked me if I were a tailor I answered. Sir, I am no a tailor, but a buttonhole maker." Something must have clicked in the officer's mind because he told me to got to the right--the side...
...Pisar's most dramatic brush with death came roughly a year later, after he, Ben and "several hundred others who had stubbornly refused to die" had been transported to Auschwitz. One morning, Pisar's number was called and he and his group were placed in a halfway barrack to have their numbers checked off as they waited their turn: "We stand closely packed in a dread silence." Pisar writes, "the faces around me flushed with the rage of helplessness, or some crazed hope of last-minute deliverance, or the hallucinatory peace of the imminence of death. At the back...
...Slowly, Pisar crept across the floor, past people who were too benumbed to notice. Reaching the pail, he began scrubbing the floor vigorously--scrubbing and drying and inching his way toward the door. Called back by the guards to clean a corner for the second time, he resumed his slow progress to the door. Reaching it at last he arose and walked toward the barracks, losing himself once more in the anonymity of the camp. He was just 15 years...
...endless, pervasive smell of death and terror so constant it becomes mundane: the brothels, the body pits, the typhus, the orchestra of European virtuosos forced to sit near the machine--gun towers playing Mozart while the furnaces belched fire and smoke "Most cynical and indecent" of all. Pisar recalls, was the sign which hung above the main gate of Auschwitz proclaiming Arbeit Machl Frei--"Work Brings Freedom...