Holocaust’s Horrors : Survivor’s Exhibit of Death Camp Artifacts Recalls Nazi Atrocities

Mel Mermelstein walked through the display of his Holocaust artifacts at the Mills House Art Gallery in Garden Grove and pointed out the one he called most significant.

The foot-high yellow and orange canister bearing a skull and crossbones was labeled with German words, Giftgas and Zyklon B.

Zyklon B was the type of Giftgas , poison gas, the Nazis used in death chambers to destroy millions of Jews and other prisoners. Among the victims were Mermelstein’s mother and two sisters who, witnesses have told him, died in Auschwitz gas chamber No. 5 in 1944. His father and brother also died in the camps.

Mermelstein, now 61 and a Huntington Beach businessman, was his family’s only survivor of the Nazi death camps. If you ask, he will unbutton the cuff of his crisp striped shirt and show you the permanent reminder of his year at Auschwitz: a blue tattoo reading A-4685.

Liberated by U.S. troops 43 years ago next Monday, Mermelstein said he regrets that he no longer sheds tears over the atrocities he witnessed. Rather, he works to fulfill a pledge made to his father as Auschwitz chimneys “were belching their hellish flame” behind them. If he should survive, he promised, he would tell everyone what the Nazis did.

Working with items from his past, despite their horrific nature, provides solace and a feeling of relief, he said. “It brings reality to life. You can’t keep it locked up. This way, I deal with it.”

A member of the International Auschwitz Committee, a historical preservation group, Mermelstein has returned to Auschwitz every year for the last 14 years. Sunday he will leave for his 15th trip.

He brings back, with the approval of German officials, artifacts from the camps: barbed wire, ashes, cloth stars reading “Jude,” railroad spikes from the track that led to the gas chambers.

The Mills House exhibit represents less than a quarter of his collection, for which Mermelstein is seeking a permanent home.

He has arranged some items into symbolic assemblages, with names of the camps spelled out in barbed wire. Underneath the Zyklon B canister are four insulators, used on the electrified wire, filled with ashes found around the camp crematories. They represent the 4 million men, women and children exterminated at Auschwitz, Mermelstein said.

More than 6 million Jews were killed during the war years, though Mermelstein quickly says that the systematic annihilation of the Jews--as well as Gypsies and the disabled--had nothing to do with the war itself.

The display--considered by experts to be an unusually large private collection--is presented in cooperation with the Anti-Defamation League of Orange County. It is part of an art exhibit, “From Ashes to Life,” which includes paintings by Israeli artists and continues through April 22 at the Mills House Art Gallery, 12732 Main St., Garden Grove.

Meanwhile, communitywide observances have been held this week for Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day April 13.

The exhibit includes photo-enlarged copies of checks totaling $90,000 that Mermelstein received after settling a lawsuit against the Torrance-based Institute for Historical Review, which had offered him a $50,000 reward if he could prove “Jews were gassed in gas chambers at Auschwitz.”

In 1981, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge concluded that the Holocaust is “just simply a fact,” and in 1985 a settlement was reached that included an apology from the institute. The apology is also displayed in the gallery.

Because Americans have told Mermelstein they “didn’t know” about Jewish persecution during the 1930s and 1940s, the exhibit includes 1939 newspaper clippings with such headlines as “Czech Prison Camp Set Up,” “Slovakians Harass Jews” and “Ruthenia Taken by Hungarians.”

The exhibit includes books, a blue- and gray-striped prisoner’s winter jacket, utensils, children’s shoes and human hair. There are also photos of Mermelstein and his family and of other emaciated camp victims and survivors.

About 300 people have seen the exhibit since it opened March 20. Most people “find it disturbing but necessary, especially in light of recent neo-Nazi activities,” said exhibit installer Don Hayes.

Holocaust photographs can be so upsetting that viewers have been known to break down in tears or vomit, said Aaron Breitbart, senior researcher at the Los Angeles Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Holocaust research organization.

Although that museum displays artifacts and photographs to show the “full horror” of the death camps, exhibitors decline to show things the average person cannot take, he said. “Let’s face it, we’re dealing with the sickest period of man’s history. Jews and non-Jews were murdered for no other reason than the circumstances of their birth,” Breitbart said.

“As much as it’s upsetting, the truth has to be told for the better good--that it will never happen again if people know it did happen and it could happen.”