Foreign diplomats gathered in Jerusalem on Monday to hear the story of a Holocaust survivor as part of Holocaust Remembrance Day programming, with survivor Arnold Clevs sharing his experiences of enduring several work and concentration camps during World War II.
At the event organized by Zikaron Basalon and the Anti-Defamation League at the latter’s Jerusalem office, Clevs brought the diplomats back in time to when he was eight years old. He had been living in Kovno, Lithuania, when the Nazis entered the country.
“On Sunday morning, I was still a child. On Monday, I became a man,” he said.
Clevs’s father decided that their best chance at survival would be to flee the city for rural towns. With his parents and older sister, they tried to escape the march of German invasion forces. “The road was hell on earth,” said Clevs.
The road was full of war refugees fleeing the Nazi advance, and German warplanes strafed and bombed any target that made itself available. The road became littered with human and animal carcasses, and it was the first time he had seen a dead body. However, it would be far from the last.
Clevs’s father was separated from the family, and when the rest of them reached a town, the Jewish refugees discovered that the German forces had already arrived. When he watched the invading soldiers march through the street, one Lithuanian person pointed to him, saying, “Hey, look at the little Jew boy.”
Clevs and his family realized that they would not be welcome there and decided that the best course of action would be to return to Kovno by river rowboat. They hired a boatman, but as they rowed on, they noticed that the river was filled with the bodies of slain soldiers. The boatman refused to continue, and so the Clevs family continued on foot.
The Clevs family was stopped by a German patrol and detained at a former Soviet military barracks, where Lithuanian collaborators with the Nazi regime inflicted cruelties upon Jewish captives. They would take pleasure in sliding their rifles through the windows and discharging into the ceiling, delighting in the Jews’ fright. They would come and take the pretty girls, who would never be seen again. Clevs said that his mother covered his sister so that she wouldn’t be seen by their captors.
Later on, the family was taken to a prison facility, where they implored a Lithuanian officer to see to their release as patriotic Lithuanians, as Clevs’s father had volunteered in the Lithuanian military. The officer released them, and they reunited with Clevs’s father at their home in Kovno. However, this was just the beginning of the tribulations that Clevs related.
New laws and regulations were implemented under the Nazi occupation. Valuables were stripped from the possession of Jews, and they faced constant humiliation. They were also forced to wear the Star of David while walking in the streets.
Clevs’s voice wavered as he recalled the glee that his neighbors expressed at their degradation. If the Jews saw a German, they had to take off their hat and bow, he shared. When they were moved to a ghetto, he watched his family physician fail to remove his hat quickly enough to a German officer’s liking. The officer shot him dead and continued walking.
“This is how much the life of a Jew was worth,” said Clevs.
Around thirty thousand Jews were moved into a ghetto where nearly half the number of occupants had previously resided. They were packed into small apartments with no food. “The conditions in the ghetto were very difficult,” he shared.
On a snowy and brutally cold day in October 1942, the soldiers lined up the ghetto inhabitants. They stood for hours, being sent left or right at the discretion of the authorities. Clevs’s mother saw that the group on the right was receiving better treatment, and she quickly pulled her family with her as she had been sent in that direction. Clevs credits this as a decision that saved his life, as the Jews in the left group were later shot.
Family relocated to labor camp, children stolen
Eventually, the family was relocated to a labor camp. There, Clevs’s parents saved his life once again. His father had helped build the camp, and when soldiers came to take the elderly and young children away, his father had hidden him, as well as some others, in a small space. He watched from a crack in the boards as the group was loaded onto trucks. One small boy who couldn’t climb was flung by a soldier onto the others like he was a hunk of meat. Most of the parents had been away laboring when their children had been stolen, and they returned to find them all gone.
ONE DAY, the men were separated from the women and loaded onto trains. After a long journey to a new camp in Germany, they were beaten with batons by the German soldiers. Clevs was separated from his father, who told him to remember that they had family in the United States and that they would meet there after the war. Unfortunately, his father did not survive for the reunion.
From the Jewish Lithuanian ghetto ranks, 130 youth survived up until that point. One of them was a 16-year-old who refused to abandon his younger brother. He insisted that they act like soldiers instead of children. The boy had them march in formation when summoned by the Nazis and take off their hats in unison. Clevs said that this impressed the Germans, who decided that they could still be of use.
When Clevs’s arm was tattooed, he believed that if they were taking the time to mark him then he must have some value. He laughed about the mistaken belief, and he related how his arm swelled from infection after being tattooed with an unsterile needle.
In Birkenau, half his group was killed, and Clevs recalled the smell of his friends’ burning flesh from the crematorium. He mainly stayed in the latrines, where the Germans avoided entering.
Soon, he was marched out of Birkenau, a journey in the snow that took several days. Those who stopped or stepped out of the line were shot. When they finally arrived at the camp, he was given a ration of bread and fell asleep. He awoke to discover his rations had been stolen. His friends found the thief and returned the bread. Clevs said that this moment demonstrated the importance of unity – if Jews were united, they could fight together.
His group was moved to the Mauthausen camp in Austria, which Clevs described as mostly consisting of tents. When he entered a tent and failed to find his friends, Clevs sought them out. An officer spotted him and shot at him for leaving his tent, but missed. Clevs fled into a tent, and the other inmates covered him with a blanket to conceal him.
Later, an allied bombing run struck the tents. Wracked by hunger, some of the victims had attempted to resort to cannibalism and sate themselves on their brethren who had been killed. According to Clevs, the German soldiers shot them dead.
At the final camp in Gunskirchen, live and dead bodies were packed into buildings with no food or utilities. Clevs and his friends had resolved to risk escape when American jeeps rolled into the camp.
Clevs was taken to Italy by the British Army’s Jewish Brigade, with the intention of bringing him to the Land of Israel. At Santa Maria Di Bagno, a Jewish reporter interviewed Clevs as well as other survivors before they embarked for Mandatory Palestine. The article was read by a friend of his mother’s in Hungary, where his mother and sister had reached on their own journeys.
Clevs recalled how he was asked one day at the camp what he would do if he could meet his mother. He couldn’t even entertain the idea. But in the moment of their reunion, at the peak of a hill, he saw his mother waiting for him at the bottom. They ran to one another and embraced.
Together with his sister, they eventually moved to the United States. Clevs would come to serve as an officer in the same military that liberated him from the camps of Europe.
He was joined by his final revenge on Nazi Germany in Jerusalem this last Monday – his son. Despite all the horrors he had endured and after having lived the American dream, Clevs made Aliyah a few years ago and settled in Jerusalem. He remarked that he could not complain about his life now.
While on Monday the only siren that sounded was the one commemorating survivors, only days before warning sirens were ringing, signaling attacks from a different war than the one that defined Clevs’s early life.
Due to the war, ADL Israel director Carole Nuriel said that two days prior, it wasn’t clear if the event would occur. However, with the ceasefire in place, the organizers were glad to welcome diplomats from Guatemala and Norway, among a dozen others.
“It’s so important to hear the stories of Holocaust survivors,” said Nuriel, who later updated the diplomats on the current state of antisemitism. She contended that antisemitism was “anti everyone” and all governments had a responsibility to help stamp it out.
Clevs also remarked on the rise in antisemitism, saying that he thought that “the world is a little crazy.”