A 50-Year Anniversary Raises All-Too-Painful Memories

“I just don’t understand it.”

Jack Pinto’s words tumble forth in a cascade of anguish.

“What did the Jewish people do to deserve this?” he says, looking in puzzlement at two recent newspaper clippings in the lounge of the Woodland Hills apartment complex where he lives.

One headline reads: “Couple’s Home, Car Scarred by Anti-Semitic Graffiti.” The story describes how swastikas and the words “Die Jew” were painted on a home and car in Westlake Village.

The other tells of a controversy brewing in London over British historian David Irving, who outraged other historians and Jewish groups by contending that reports of the Holocaust were exaggerated.

“I feel terrible that people say it isn’t true,” says Pinto, who knows all too well what happened at Auschwitz.

Because he was there.

Because he is just about to turn 85 and this is a bad time for him, an evil anniversary.

It was just 50 years ago that the Gestapo swept up Pinto, his wife and children from their Amsterdam apartment.

Memories come back to him of his wife, Ella, and their daughter, Sinny, 5, and son, Johnny, 3. Memories are all he has of them because they died together in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

In October, 1942, the Germans took him and other men off a train at Gogolin, Poland, and his wife and children remained aboard, he said.

“It was the lowest and most painful point of my life,” Pinto says. “I was never to see my family again.”

After the war, the Red Cross confirmed for him that the train took them to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. He was there too, eventually, one of six concentration camps he survived over a period of three years.

The numbers 160572 tattooed on his left forearm serve as a permanent reminder for him.

His mother and father died at other camps. Two sisters and a brother were also imprisoned, but because they had been born in England and had British passports, they were held in an internment camp at Liebenau, Germany, and survived the war.

Pinto has yet to fully come to terms with the past. It still leaves him bewildered, unable to express the depth of the pain he has lived with for half a century.

“I always wonder why, why, why did the Germans do it,” says Pinto. “It happened 50 years ago, but I’m still wondering.”

A camp in Schoppenitz, Poland, was Pinto’s next stop after losing his family. It was there that he used his skills as a barber to shave the heads of fellow Jews. He also carted away some of their corpses, dumping them into burial pits.

In October, 1943, he was taken by train to Auschwitz where he says he remembers the Nazi death camp physician Joseph Mengele--nicknamed “the Angel of Death”--entering his barracks and deciding who among 200 men there would live, and who would die.

Pinto says he joined 16 other blue-eyed blondes who were motioned by Mengele to pass to his right and thus were given another chance at life; the more than 175 men who Mengele directed to pass to his left died the next day in the gas chambers.

Half a century later, Pinto is still haunted by images of Auschwitz, including smoking crematoriums, lice-infested prisoners reduced to skin and bones and of being whipped 15 times for stealing a piece of bread.

Pinto says he was infested with lice and weighed 62 pounds when U.S. troops liberated his camp near Passau, Germany, on May 5, 1945. It was a period of mixed emotions for Pinto, who was finally free, but whose life was forever changed.

“I didn’t want to live anymore,” says Pinto. “My family was gone.”

But while recovering in a Jewish invalid home in Amsterdam, Pinto met his second wife, Dora, who had also been incarcerated in concentration camps, where 64 members of her family were killed.

They married in 1947 and embarked on a new life, returning to Amsterdam and opening a clothing store.

In 1957, the Pintos sold the store and immigrated to Montreal with their son, Maurice. Two years later, the Pintos immigrated to Culver City, which marked the beginning of a 25-year career for Pinto as a barber at the Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo.

The Pintos retired to Woodland Hills in 1977 where Pinto says he has found a little happiness living at the Oakwood Gardens Apartments with Dora.

But to this day he cringes when he hears the German language spoken and he says he has little hope that people have changed.

“The world hasn’t learned anything,” says Pinto. “Whenever I see the Ku Klux Klan and skinheads on television talk shows, I wonder what did my little kids die for.”

He considers the newspaper clippings again, and the debate over whether the Holocaust was maybe, well, not all that horrible.

“I dream about it and sit in bed and cry about it and wonder how can they say that?” he says, his voice expressing bewilderment and pain.

“I can’t understand why they are writing things like this about Jewish people. We didn’t do anything.”