Sol Lurie MONROE — Sol Lurie, a township resident and Holocaust survivor, endured life in a Lithuanian ghetto, imprisonment in six concentration camps and a grueling death march through the harsh European winter.
Those experiences, Lurie said, are what led him to places like Monroe Township Middle School, where he addressed a full auditorium of students with a simple message: “Make sure you love one another, respect one another and treat people the way you want to be treated.”
Lurie, 84, was born in Lithuania, where “life was beautiful” and relatively free of the anti-Semitic turmoil that was soon to come, he said.
On June 22, 1941, the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union, pushing eastward into Lithuania. It was then, Lurie said, that his family decided to pack up and move deeper into the Soviet Union in a bid for shelter from the Nazi war machine.
“When Hitler came to power … people started to change,” Lurie said. “[Hitler] hypnotized people.
“The problem is, people weren’t thinking for themselves,” he added. “Never be a follower. Think for yourself what the right thing to do is and then do it — not what someone else tells you.”
The only possessions Lurie and his family brought on the exodus were a wagon loaded with some necessities and two horses to pull it.
The very next morning, the German Wehrmacht caught up with them, he said.
Their horses had been stolen the night before while they slept, but a German soldier secured two others and told Lurie and his family to head back to their hometown.
Upon returning, Lurie found his home had been ransacked and occupied, and his family was forced to take up shelter in their now empty stables, he said.
Very quickly, the 11-year-old Lurie’s life began to change. First, his cousin was beaten to death for not bowing low enough to German soldiers. Soon after, Lurie said, children had to be hidden — since they couldn’t work in the newly established ghettos, children were deemed useless by the Nazi government and routinely relocated.
Killings were commonplace in the ghetto, he said, and mass graves were filled and the local hospital burned.
“The Germans decided one day that the Jews didn’t need a hospital,” he said. “[Jews] weren’t human beings, we were animals.”
The ghetto became the first of six concentration camps in which Lurie would live over the next four years.
“It was the only ghetto that was turned into a concentration camp,” he said.
They were soon moved to a camp near the city of Stuttgart, where Lurie was ultimately separated from his family and shipped to Dachau, he said.
By 1944, Lurie was taken from Dachau to the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.
“The flames and the smoke were always [coming from the crematoriums],” he said. “Even now, when I am by a barbecue … my memory goes back to Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
A pervasive understanding that anyone could be killed at any moment permeated the atmosphere in Auschwitz, he said.
“We were like ants. You know, you’re walking down a sidewalk and see an ant and you just step on it,” Lurie said. “That’s how we were treated.”
In December 1944, with the Red Army approaching Auschwitz, the Nazis evacuated the camp.
“They put us on a death march, as it was called,” Lurie said. “Europe gets real cold. All we wore were … the striped pajamas, and all we had was the wooden shoes like they wear in Holland.”
The march began with 10,000 people in Lurie’s group, but ended with only 500 survivors, who were then loaded onto freight cars and taken to Buchenwald.
“I made up my mind that I had to survive this,” he said. “I had to tell the world what was going on, so I just kept on going.”
At Buchenwald, Lurie was placed in a barracks with Russian POWs who received better rations than the Jewish prisoners. Lurie said he was able to survive because of the POWs’ willingness to share with the Jews.
“They were our angels,” he said.
In a strange coincidence, Lurie said, he saw the first U.S. tank outside the camp on his birthday, April 11, 1945.
Later that day, the U.S. soldiers arrived en masse and liberated the camp.
Lurie said he moved to the United States in April 1947 after spending nearly two years in a French orphanage.
He enlisted in the U.S. Army and returned to Germany at the height of the Korean War, this time as an occupier.
Decades later, he would receive a shock while welcoming a new neighbor and fellow veteran to his neighborhood in Monroe, he said.
“He asked where I was during the war, and I mentioned all the concentration camps and that I was liberated in Buchenwald,” Lurie said.
His new neighbor began to sob uncontrollably, and Lurie thought he had offended him somehow. But when the man regained his composure, he told Lurie that he was operating the first American tank to reach Buchenwald on the day of the liberation.
While Lurie’s experience was horrific — he described it as “a nightmare that lasted for 1,388 days” — Lurie said it was because of those dark times that he now educates people about understanding and the acceptance of others.
“The most important thing when I talk about my experience is to show you what hate and discrimination do,” he said. “I want to make sure that you love, not hate.”