Remembering the Horror of the Nazi’s Death Camps : History: Henry Heller, who spoke at the Orange County Historical Society, wants people to know the Holocaust was real.

At 85, Dr. Henry Heller of Leisure World is one of the oldest survivors of Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp where fewer than 10% of the Jews who entered survived.

With attention focused on the 50th anniversary of the war’s end, Heller, a Jew, has seized the opportunity to recount the horrors he experienced during his six years of imprisonment so that everyone, especially the young, will know the Holocaust was real.

“People should not say it was not true,” said Heller, decrying writings that contend the genocide was “a hoax.”

On Sept. 10, 1939, Heller, then 29 and practicing medicine in Vienna, was rousted from bed by SS guards and whisked away in a Mercedes. He said he was not even allowed to kiss his pregnant wife, Edith, goodby.

From then on, he said, he experienced beatings, forced labor, bitter cold and near starvation at the hands of sadistic guards who were under orders to gradually kill their Jewish prisoners through abuse.

“I was spared by my belief in God, luck and my ability to have correspondence with my wife,” he said.

Framed on his bedroom wall are baby and childhood photos of his daughter, Ruth, whom he did not see until she was 6. He said the pictures were smuggled to him by a friendly foreman at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. Also displayed is an aluminum locket that Heller secretly made so that he could carry the pictures under his prison clothes.

*

Heller, who was moved by cattle car to Auschwitz, in Poland, in 1942, said that his closest call came there, when he found himself among a group of new arrivals sent to the showers, which served as gas chambers. He is convinced that the gas spigot would have been turned on if a guard from Buchenwald had not recognized him and seen to it that water was turned on instead.

While at Buchenwald, Heller pulled a heavy wagon with other prisoners at a running pace. He said that once, when he was lifting a tree trunk into the wagon, an SS guard struck him on his left hand with a club, shattering the index finger. The finger was amputated--without the benefit of anesthesia--by a fellow prisoner who was a locksmith and had no medical training.

When Auschwitz was evacuated in winter, 1944, with the approach of Russian troops, Heller said, he survived the 60-mile “death march” because he avoided falling on the ice despite having to march in wooden shoes. Anyone who fell, he said, was shot to death.

Heller said his proudest achievement at Auschwitz was an apprenticeship program he started as a leader of workers building a rubber factory. He said he was able to save the lives of 15 teen-agers who otherwise would have died working outdoors under harsh conditions. He said he still corresponds with some of those former apprentices, now in their 70s.

After the war, Heller moved his family to Chicago and practiced as a family physician. He said that for 40 years no one seemed interested in his camp experiences. That changed, he said, 10 years ago when one of his granddaughters invited him to speak to her history class in Pasadena.

Since then, he has been telling his story at other schools and service clubs. On Thursday, he spoke at a meeting of the Orange County Historical Society.

Heller said the concentration camps did not make him bitter. In fact, he said, friends comment that he smiles a lot.

“I’m happy I’m here. Hitler is dead,” he said.