Sep 29, 2008 7:48 am US/Eastern
Remembering A Tale Of Horror In Hopes Of Peace
The coming days of September 29, 2008, through October 9, 2008, mark the most important Holy Days in the Jewish calendar. The High Holidays begins with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year ending October 9 with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
But for a few South Florida residents these days mark an even more significant time. A time in their lives they want to forget. But it is a time in their lives which they can't stop talking about. Because they want to make sure the rest of us never forget what they had to survive.
CBS4 I-Team investigator Stephen Stock has spent the last 10 months putting together their story.
The number, 67680, remains burned in Bronia Merlin's skin to this day.
"We hear shooting and catching the people like the dogs," Merlin said.
The unspeakable horror the simple digits carry also remains burned into her memory.
"They took me out and I never saw my parents again," Merlin said.
64 years later what happened then, remains seared into Bronia Merlin's very being as clearly as the brand in her skin.
Merlin recalled, "They took me to Birkenau-Auschwitz. And they put my number down." It is a number that still haunts her even in her sleep.
"I dream one time about my parents. Sitting (there). And I (remember there are) no pictures because they burned (all the pictures). They took everything," Merlin said.
Merlin's nightmares seem so real to her even 64 years later they haunt her even now. In fact, Bronia Merlin broke her neck just a few months ago trying to get away from Nazi SS troops, even while she slept safely in bed at her daughter's home near Atlanta.
"I was dreaming they want to catch me," Merlin said. "I say 'No!' 'No!'"
Merlin says the nightmares reflect on the Nazi's selection process she endured back then. It is a process that remains real and disturbing 64 years later.
"The selection," Merlin recalled "(where) they (the Nazi concentration camp guards) say 'You're going to take a shower.' It wasn't a shower. You stay naked and the SS, Hitler's people, (Adolf) Eichmann (select you.)"
Back then, two lines were formed by the Nazi's. Those people in the right were spared to go to work in camps. Those in the left line went to the gas chamber. It was a line Bronia Merlin was selected to be put in one day.
"One day from right they send me on the side to left," Merlin recalled "to death."
But someone else in that line on the left suggested that Bronia Merlin go back to Adolf Eichmann himself and beg, naked and terrified, for her life.
"Please let me live! I say I'm going to work hard for you," Merlin said remembering how she pleaded with Eichmann. Bronia Merlin thus earned herself a place back in the line on the right.
"He looked down on me. (In German) 'What kind of number I have?' And I show," Merlin recalled of Eichmann speaking to her as she begged. "So he (Eichmann) put down the woman standing with the book. He told her to strike out my number (on the list.)" Merlin says. "He told to go back from left to right."
Paul Gast remembers too.
"I don't have a number because I was being sent to Germany (to work in labor camps)," Gast says now today.
64 years ago during the Jewish High Holy Days, Paul Gast who was 14-years-old at the time, was selected, just like Bronia Merlin, to walk in the left line.
"They were still picking people to go to the gas chambers and I was picked," Gast now said.
Adolph Eichmann didn't save Paul Gast that day. But a Jewish member of the Gestapo, who had earlier befriended the teenager, did save Gast."The trucks were already starting to take the people to the gas chambers," Gast said.
Other members of Gast's family along with thousands of others picked to stand in the left line that day did not survive. Paul Gast went in the line on the right.
"And we went and we reported to the train. And we were sent to Auschwitz," Gast remembered of the first time he realized he was being sent from the Jewish ghetto (a town called Lodz) in Poland. "Unfortunately, my uncle and aunt, They were separated from me (once they got to Auschwitz)," Gast said.
Paul Gast never saw his aunt, his uncle, or his mother, again.
"I have seen babies (and) children thrown from third floor (of) hospitals," Gast said. "I've seen them torn apart on to trucks and trailers."
"I say when I come out (of Auschwitz) I am not going to believe in nothing.'Where is God?" 'Why is God?'" Bronia Merlin said. "'Is he sees the little children and they (the Nazis) throw them on fire?' They (the Nazis) take them from the arms, the babies from the mother."
For decades, neither Bronia Merlin nor Paul Gast could speak of those terrible events that they saw and experienced.
"I have suppressed my past for over 50 years," Paul Gast says. But now they speak of the unspeakable. Because they believe they must share their story with the rest of us, so we never forget.
"I feel that it is proper and I feel that it is necessary to talk to the younger generation about the past," Paul Gast said. "Seeing what is going on today still in other places in the world (such as The Sudan, Darfur, etc.) you have to alert them today about what happened."
"So we should know this. A new generation has to know what kind of monster Hitler was," Bronia Merlin said. Of her entire family, mother, father, brother, 3 sisters, only Bronia and a younger sister survived the Holocaust.
After she was released, Bronia Merlin met another concentration camp survivor and raised three children in Jacksonville, Florida. One of those children, her only son, is now Judge Samuel Slom, the chief administrative judge for Miami-Dade's criminal court division.
In his family, only Paul Gast survived. He later learned, with the help of the American Red Cross, that his mother likely was not executed in a concentration camp but died of heart failure. However, after he was separated from his family he never saw any of them again.
Like Merlin, Paul Gast raised a family after he escaped the Holocaust too. Gast first went to London before emigrating to America. He was one of the 732 young men featured in the book "The Boys" by Martin Gilbert. "The Boys" is a compilation of the stories of a tight-knit band of teenagers who worked and survived concentration camps.
After coming to America, Gast built his own successful business career in the northeast before retiring to Florida with his wife. Gast now lives in Aventura.
Both Gast and Merlin said they speak out now because it has become fashionable for some extremists to now insist the holocaust NEVER happened. They say if you have any doubt about the veracity of the Holocaust listen again to their stories.
