Linda Breder has been to Auschwitz five times. Four of those trips were voluntary.
The Slovakian-born survivor served as one of the chaperones for the Bay Area contingent on the recently concluded March of the Living. And the 81-year-old firmly stated that this trip to the “factory of death” is her last.
“I wanted to go back. I wanted to see, for the last time, the place where I suffered and where my parents and whole family perished in the gas chamber,” said Breder, a San Franciscan who spent nearly three years in Auschwitz and Birkenau.
“I never ever will go back. But I am happy I went. Because the people I joined, the young people, they deserve it, you know? They listened to everything … and I think they were very pleased to have someone there to talk firsthand, a survivor.”
The Bay Area contingent joined 18,000 people from 70 countries in Poland from May 3 to 9 and in Israel until May 14
Unlike past years, the Bay Area delegation to March of the Living was comprised of young adults instead of teenagers. Trip co-coordinator Mariana Roytman Schiffner said she believed survivors Breder and Helen and Joe Farkas of Burlingame were able to speak without censoring themselves to the more mature audience, and the survivors concurred.
“I told them exactly what happened,” said Breder.
She pulled no punches for the 20 Bay Area trip-goers, pointing out the very bunk she and eight other Slovak girls were forced to sleep on without blankets or straw and clothed only in bloody and lice-ridden uniforms taken off the bodies of slaughtered Russian prisoners of war.
She told the teary group how she was forced to defecate in her food bowl. How she lost her entire family. How she watched a Nazi guard kill a Jewish infant by grabbing its heels and dashing its head into a wall.
“When you talk to teens, you don’t want to traumatize them too much. This level of honesty, this level of brutality, I don’t think [the trip-goers] realized we’d get into that,” said Schiffner, 27, who attended March of the Living nine years ago when she was a student at Hebrew Academy.
It was a momentous event for Shiffner, and not just because she led a trip she’d attended as a child.
When she was 17, the survivor accompanying Schiffner’s group was Fred Diamant of Los Angeles. He confided in her that his brother had been executed at Auschwitz’s “shooting wall,” and Nazi guards held his eyes open and forced him to watch.
Schiffner visited the shooting wall and said Kaddish for both Diamant — who has since died — and his brother.
On Yom HaShoah, the thousands of trip participants marched from Auschwitz to Birkneau — the reverse of the death walks, and that’s no accident — and listened to speeches from, among others, Elie Wiesel and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
For Schiffner and the others, heading to Israel after the week in Poland was “literally going from darkness to light. In Israel we went straight to Jaffa Beach and celebrated. You almost couldn’t believe it. It was like a miracle.”
The week in Israel didn’t take the great pain away for Breder, though. On the flight from Tel Aviv to New York City, she experienced chest pains and was met on the tarmac by an ambulance.
“I was so tense. When I came back to New York, I couldn’t take it anymore,” she said.
“It was not a stroke, not a heart attack. It was anxiety. [The trip] was a lot of pressure. It was so hard.”
It was a difficult trip for Helen and Joe Farkas as well. Joe spent most of the war in a forced labor camp, and lost his parents in Auschwitz. Helen, who spent three months in Auschwitz, believes this is her last trip to the death camp as well.
“I have a hard time explaining the feeling of being back there again, to see the monuments and what’s left over. They destroyed most of the places I stayed in. Block 10 and 12, they’re all gone. To see those crematoriums, the gas chambers, to see the shoes and the hair — even though my husband and I have chaperoned students to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., this is so much more dramatic,” said Helen, who, like her husband, is 85.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever go back again. Maybe this was a closure of some sort for me.”