JUDA - A man born on a train traveling to a Nazi concentration camp during World War II visited Juda High School Tuesday to talk about the Holocaust and the life of his mother.
Dr. Mark Olsky, 71, was born on or near April 20, 1945 - the last birthday of Adolf Hitler.
"That's what it says on my driver's license and my passport, so I'm sticking with it," Olsky told an audience of Juda middle- and high-schoolers.
Olsky, who was an emergency medicine specialist at Monroe Clinic, visited Juda with author Wendy Holden, an English biographer and historian who wrote about Olsky's mother and two other Jewish mothers during the Holocaust in her 2015 book "Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope."
"I call them my babies," Holden said of her subjects, three people who were born to prisoners in concentration camps during the final days of WWII.
Holden said she discovered the story of the three children in 2013 when she read the obituary of a woman who had given birth while interned at Auschwitz. When she investigated other victims who had given birth during the Holocaust, she discovered the first of the three children, Eva Clarke.
While researching Clarke's mother, Holden discovered two other pregnant mothers who had shared similar journeys and had given birth to their own children, Hana Berger Moran and Olsky.
Olsky's mother Rachel was the oldest of nine siblings and was living with her husband near Lodz, Poland, when the Third Reich came into power. Her family, like all Jewish families in the area, was rounded up and forced to live in the Lodz ghetto. The family concealed its youngest members behind a false wall in their new home to protect them from being killed outright by the Nazis.
It wasn't to last. In the late summer of 1944, the family was caught by the Nazis and were taken to Auschwitz. Rachel, her parents and her three oldest sisters shared a train to the camp. Rachel's husband stayed behind in the ghetto and was shot and killed. Rachel was two months pregnant at the time.
Had Rachel and the other two mothers been in a later term of their pregnancies, they would surely have been killed at Auschwitz, Holden said. Nazi geneticist Josef Mengele ordered the extermination of all prisoners unfit for labor, including pregnant women. Instead, the three mothers were sent to work at a munitions factory under brutal, dehumanizing conditions.
Months later, after the bombing of the nearby town of Dresden, Mengele decided that the surviving prisoners of Auschwitz should be relocated before Allied soldiers discovered the existence of the Holocaust. The day before the prisoners departed, Priska, one of the mothers, gave birth to Hana.
Olsky said his mother rarely mentioned the train journey from Auschwitz to Mauthausen during which he was born. The prisoners were packed into open-topped coal cars and were fed only rarely. When Olsky was born, a sympathetic Nazi guard recorded the date of birth as April 20, in the hopes that the auspicious date would allow the child to live.
The train arrived at Mauthausen on April 29. The day before, the camp had run out of Zyklon B gas, and was unable to exterminate the new prisoners. The day after, Adolf Hitler committed suicide.
The surviving prisoners were left to die in the camp barracks, but were discovered when soldiers of Gen. George Patton's 11th Armored Division disobeyed orders so they could liberate the camp.
Olsky said when he learned the story of the circumstances of his birth, he intended to travel to Germany to "settle scores," but his mother refused to permit him.
"She said, "they've taken away so much from us,'" Olsky said. ""But if you grow up angry and vengeful, they will also have taken your soul. And you should never let them take that from you.'"
Instead, Olsky pursued a medical education, eventually moving to Chicago thanks to a family member in America. A patient encouraged him to move to Madison. He then joined the emergency medical unit in Monroe, where he worked for 27 years.
Rachel died in 2003 in Nashville.
Holden said the story of the children remains as important as ever, in a world struggling with a global refugee crisis, and where hate speech and demagoguery are all too common.
"We still live in a world of contemporary genocide," Holden said. Even though a campaign of extermination on the scale of the Holocaust is unlikely to occur today thanks to global media, genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia were still possible.
Olsky, meanwhile, decried Holocaust denial as an ideology rooted in anti-Semitic and bigoted ideas.
"If people are just naive and they can't believe anybody could ever do anything so evil, then I can understand it," Olsky said. "But nearly everybody who denies the Holocaust is just a very nasty person."
"We need to stop hate speech wherever it starts," Holden said. "When we allow hate speech to continue, it becomes mainstream."
Dr. Mark Olsky, 71, was born on or near April 20, 1945 - the last birthday of Adolf Hitler.
"That's what it says on my driver's license and my passport, so I'm sticking with it," Olsky told an audience of Juda middle- and high-schoolers.
Olsky, who was an emergency medicine specialist at Monroe Clinic, visited Juda with author Wendy Holden, an English biographer and historian who wrote about Olsky's mother and two other Jewish mothers during the Holocaust in her 2015 book "Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope."
"I call them my babies," Holden said of her subjects, three people who were born to prisoners in concentration camps during the final days of WWII.
Holden said she discovered the story of the three children in 2013 when she read the obituary of a woman who had given birth while interned at Auschwitz. When she investigated other victims who had given birth during the Holocaust, she discovered the first of the three children, Eva Clarke.
While researching Clarke's mother, Holden discovered two other pregnant mothers who had shared similar journeys and had given birth to their own children, Hana Berger Moran and Olsky.
Olsky's mother Rachel was the oldest of nine siblings and was living with her husband near Lodz, Poland, when the Third Reich came into power. Her family, like all Jewish families in the area, was rounded up and forced to live in the Lodz ghetto. The family concealed its youngest members behind a false wall in their new home to protect them from being killed outright by the Nazis.
It wasn't to last. In the late summer of 1944, the family was caught by the Nazis and were taken to Auschwitz. Rachel, her parents and her three oldest sisters shared a train to the camp. Rachel's husband stayed behind in the ghetto and was shot and killed. Rachel was two months pregnant at the time.
Had Rachel and the other two mothers been in a later term of their pregnancies, they would surely have been killed at Auschwitz, Holden said. Nazi geneticist Josef Mengele ordered the extermination of all prisoners unfit for labor, including pregnant women. Instead, the three mothers were sent to work at a munitions factory under brutal, dehumanizing conditions.
Months later, after the bombing of the nearby town of Dresden, Mengele decided that the surviving prisoners of Auschwitz should be relocated before Allied soldiers discovered the existence of the Holocaust. The day before the prisoners departed, Priska, one of the mothers, gave birth to Hana.
Olsky said his mother rarely mentioned the train journey from Auschwitz to Mauthausen during which he was born. The prisoners were packed into open-topped coal cars and were fed only rarely. When Olsky was born, a sympathetic Nazi guard recorded the date of birth as April 20, in the hopes that the auspicious date would allow the child to live.
The train arrived at Mauthausen on April 29. The day before, the camp had run out of Zyklon B gas, and was unable to exterminate the new prisoners. The day after, Adolf Hitler committed suicide.
The surviving prisoners were left to die in the camp barracks, but were discovered when soldiers of Gen. George Patton's 11th Armored Division disobeyed orders so they could liberate the camp.
Olsky said when he learned the story of the circumstances of his birth, he intended to travel to Germany to "settle scores," but his mother refused to permit him.
"She said, "they've taken away so much from us,'" Olsky said. ""But if you grow up angry and vengeful, they will also have taken your soul. And you should never let them take that from you.'"
Instead, Olsky pursued a medical education, eventually moving to Chicago thanks to a family member in America. A patient encouraged him to move to Madison. He then joined the emergency medical unit in Monroe, where he worked for 27 years.
Rachel died in 2003 in Nashville.
Holden said the story of the children remains as important as ever, in a world struggling with a global refugee crisis, and where hate speech and demagoguery are all too common.
"We still live in a world of contemporary genocide," Holden said. Even though a campaign of extermination on the scale of the Holocaust is unlikely to occur today thanks to global media, genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia were still possible.
Olsky, meanwhile, decried Holocaust denial as an ideology rooted in anti-Semitic and bigoted ideas.
"If people are just naive and they can't believe anybody could ever do anything so evil, then I can understand it," Olsky said. "But nearly everybody who denies the Holocaust is just a very nasty person."
"We need to stop hate speech wherever it starts," Holden said. "When we allow hate speech to continue, it becomes mainstream."