berlin | His eyes have seen what they never should have seen. He has heard what no one ever should hear.
Josef “Yossel” Czarny is one of very few Jews to survive the Treblinka death camp in Poland.
Czarny recently came here from Israel as part of a delegation marking the anniversary of the July 20, 1944, failed attempt on Hitler’s life.
For many Germans, that date symbolizes resistance against Nazism. But for Czarny, who has attended the annual ceremonies several times, it’s not so simple.
“If the 20th of July plot had succeeded, if it worked, maybe the regime would have ended and the camps, like Auschwitz, would have been shut down,” said Czarny, who turns 78 this year. “But the 20th of July was not done for the Jews. It was for the Germans, because they saw that Hitler was making Germany kaput.”
Annemarie Renger, 86, agrees. She was among those Germans who hated Hitler.
“Those who tried at the last minute to prevent the worst — theirs was a great deed,” even if they were not all pro-democratic, Renger said.
As a member of the Social Democratic Party, Renger headed the German Parliament from 1972 to 1976, and she’s president of the Central Association of Democratic Resistance Fighters and Organizations of the Persecuted.
Renger hosted some 50 members of the association, including Czarny, at official ceremonies marking the somber anniversary. The events included wreath-laying at sites in Berlin where the nearly 5,000 July 20 conspirators or sympathizers were executed. The day concluded with the swearing-in of new German soldiers.
Czarny, a slight man with expressive eyes, also visited Berlin’s new Holocaust memorial and attended Sabbath services at a local synagogue.
Born to a Chassidic family in Warsaw, Czarny was 12 when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939.
By the time he was deported with his three sisters in the summer of 1942, their parents had died of starvation. Czarny was packed into a boxcar, destination unknown. He recalls being so thirsty that he wiped condensed sweat from the ceiling and licked his fingers.
“They took us to Treblinka. We didn’t know what Treblinka was, but we knew it was our last trip,” he said.
Against all odds, Czarny survived. Nearly 900,000 people were gassed to death or shot in the period of the camp’s operation, from July 1942 to late summer 1943. Of the prisoners assigned to work, many committed suicide.
In the summer of 1943, knowing that the camp would soon be liquidated, prisoners planned a revolt. On Aug. 2, they set fire to the gas chambers and escaped.
According to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum, of the 750 who fled that day, only 70 lived to see liberation. But Czarny was one of them.
Czarny spent about a year in a displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen. There he met a young woman, Frida, who had survived Auschwitz.
In 1947, Czarny joined the Jewish Brigade and moved to Palestine. He married Frida; they have three children and 10 grandchildren.