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NORTH BRUNSWICK- On April 11, Sol Lurie celebrated his 78th birthday.
On April 11, he also celebrated his 63rd birthday.
Seems impossible, unless you seek out an explanation: although the Monroe resident was born in 1930, he was liberated from a concentration camp in 1945 and considers that to be his second birthday.
Lurie, who was born in Lithuania, survived six concentration camps over 1,388 days during the Holocaust. He was just 11 years old when the Germans came to his home.
"Can you imagine, all of a sudden somebody comes over to you and says ‘You’re not a human being anymore, you are an animal. We are going to take away your name and give you a number,’ and they give you this [tag] we have to put on the front of our clothes and the back of our clothes … and they say, ‘We are going to put you in a cage and you are going to live like an animal. We are going to tell you when to eat, when to get up, when to walk.’ That is the nightmare," Lurie recalled.
Lurie spoke to seventh-grade students at Linwood Middle School on April 9, as part of the school’s observance of Holocaust Remembrance Week, April 27 through May 3.
Lurie said that about 65,000 people lived in just two square miles, in a "cage," which was the ghetto. He, his parents and his three brothers shared one room, with the toilets outside, and were only given two slices of bread.
"We were becoming not just like animals – we wished we were animals. We used to wish we were German shepherds because German soldiers fed their German shepherds. Us humans were treated like insects," he said. In less than seven months, he said, 138,000 Jews were killed there, "like ants."
Lurie spoke of one particularly gruesome killing, in which children who "had no use" were killed. He said he, his cousin, and his cousin’s 7-month-old and two other children were hiding in a hole in the ground in a stable where his father worked.
His cousin was an asthmatic and had trouble breathing because of the hay and wheat covering them, so the Germans came in and noticed the hole. Lurie said as the soldiers hollered, the baby began to cry, so they threw the baby into the air and caught the baby on a bayonet, twirling it around.
"They were having fun, having a ball. They weren’t human beings; they were animals, but worse than any animals because animals only kill for food. They were having fun," Lurie said.
Lurie ran away after the murder, but the Germans followed him. As he was being shot at, he jumped over a fence and ran toward an outhouse, eventually jumping into the pile of waste to disguise himself. He said the Germans looked in the outhouse but didn’t look down, and he was saved.
He then said he waited until it was dark to go home, and since his mother thought he was dead, she ran over to him, hugging and kissing him, despite his being covered in waste.
"I just wanted to show you what a mother’s love is," he told the class. "You only get one mother and one father in your lifetime- irreplaceable. You have to show them how much you love them."
He said that since the age of 14, not one day goes by that he doesn’t think about his parents. He told the students to go home, kiss their parents and tell them they love them.
Despite this tragic experience, Lurie said he does not hate all Germans. He said, "Don’t think about a person’s color, their nationality … just look at the individual. We are all God’s children no matter what religion; we are all God’s children.We all have the same blood.…If he is a good person, it doesn’t matter the color of his face."
He also said this taught him to have the will to survive, and that if you set your mind to something, you can accomplish anything.
This is why, despite seeing people buried alive, marching in the snow for a month, being separated from his family, washing himself with soap made out of the fat of Jews who were burned to death, and being chosen for an experiment that used human skin to help heal soldiers’ burns, he maintained his hope that he would survive.
On April 11, 1945, an American tank came through the gates and freed him.
However, he said a lot of people died because they were so malnourished that the food they were given caused lethal diarrhea and dysentery. Lurie said because he was raised kosher and only ate potatoes and bread, he didn’t get sick.
Also, although the French government wanted to take more than 500 orphans and place them in a mental institution, he said "we proved them all wrong" and hundreds of Holocaust victims went on to be successful, educated people. Ironic, he said, because Hitler was supposedly a mental case and used drugs.
In 1947, he finally came to America, where his father had relatives. His father had died in a camp and one brother died in 1963, and his other two brothers went to Israel. He said he didn’t find out about his family until 1946, and currently only one brother is alive now in Israel.
He said he was so proud of living here that he volunteered to fight in the Korean War to protect the freedom of this country. He said he had basic training at Fort Dix, and again, ironically, was one of two soldiers sent to Germany to be interpreters.
"I felt like a giant there," he remembered. "You wanted to annihilate this little Jew? I’m back as a conqueror. A proud American soldier."
After moving to Monroe, he went to welcome a new neighbor to his community. When the neighbor asked where Lurie was from, the two began sharing stories, and the neighbor began to cry for about 25 minutes. Lurie said when he calmed down, he said he was on the first American tank that went into the camp.
"The man who liberated me lives five houses away from me," Lurie said, adding that the man cries every time he sees him.
Lurie stressed that bullies are cowards that must be stood up to, and that love must prevail. He said that individuality is important, and that all Americans must get involved to change the world to be a better place.
"The world don’t make people, people make the world, and the world we’re going to make is our future," he said.
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Linwood has also been commemorating the Holocaust with a butterfly project, based out of the Holocaust Museum in Houston, Texas. The museum is collecting 1.5 million butterflies to represent the children who died during the Holocaust. The seventh-grade Social Studies Department will be sending more than 300, each decorated and labeled with the name of a person that the students studied in class.
"Though the template is the same, each butterfly is decorated by the students to represent the uniqueness of each child each butterfly represents," said seventhgrade teacher Marian Felberbaum.
The butterflies were "flying" in a hallway, but will soon be sent to Texas.
Also, as a continuation of the school’s attempt to foster tolerance, Felberbaum said that 40 seventh-graders were selected, at random, to attend a trip to the Tolerance Center in New York, courtesy of a grant from the Bildner Center of Rutgers University. The students will create a poster, a PowerPoint presentation and a speech to share with their classmates about what they experienced there.
In addition, there has been an ongoing project since last year in which the seventh grade teachers have been searching for authentic items for the school’s Holocaust Learning Trunk. The school is still accepting artifacts.
Also, although Linwood usually holds a remembrance evening, this year Congregation B’nai Tikvah, on Finnegans Lane, will hold an all-day memorial service. Beginning at 9 a.m. on Thursday,May 1, community members will read the names of Holocaust victims. Anyone interested in reading may contact the temple.
Then, at 7:30 p.m., there will be an evening service, after which an interfaith memorial service will begin at 8 p.m. The theme will be the persistence of radical evil, focusing on the idea of current responsibility, not just remembrances of the past, and how genocide exists today.