Pierre Berg

I am a Holocaust survivor. I was 18-years-old, working as a courier for the French Resistance in my hometown of Nice when I was picked up by the Gestapo for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lucky for me, they never discovered I was in the resistance or you wouldn't be reading this. I shipped to a camp in Paris called Drancy and then I was sent to Auschwitz and spent one year there. I spent another six months in a camp called Dora where the Nazis were building the V1 and V2 rockets.

In 1947 my family and I moved to Los Angeles and at my first job in California a coworker inquired about the tattoo on my left arm.

"It was my license plate in a Nazi concentration camp. I lost half of my weight there. From 145 lbs to 72 lbs."

"We had a rough time, too, here in the U.S. She said. We had to eat chicken all the time."

Thinking that someday I might forget what I went through in those 18 months, I wrote down my odyssey. I was twenty-one years old. Those recollections sat in a drawer for over fifty years.

The title of my memoir is Scheisshaus Luck because it was shithouse luck that I survived.

I escaped a selection to Birkenau's gas chambers because I did a good job washing my blockelster's shirts. I fell asleep in a warehouse and was written up for an escape attempt, but because the man who tattooed me had a shaking hand, they mistook the 9 for a 3 and another poor soul was hung in my place. I turned 19 in Auschwitz. I carried the body of a Jehovah Witness out of the camp's brothel. She had committed suicide because she couldn't be anyone's whore. I helped deliver the ashes of 900 human beings to women toiling in a cabbage patch. From the looks of the heads of cabbage we made good fertilizer. I barely survived the death march out of Auschwitz, then found myself working on circuit boards for the V2 rockets in Dora. When I could, I gave those boards hell. I fell in love with a girl in the Paris camp of Drancy before we were shipped to "Pitchi Poi." In Auschwitz I dreamed of reuniting with her, but I had no fairy tale ending.

I am a gentile. I want the skinheads, the neo-Nazis, the Holocaust deniers to come to me and say that the Holocaust is just Jewish propaganda. I think my shithouse luck put me here to help put a cork in the bile they spew.

Very soon there will be no Holocaust survivors left. We will all be in our graves and I fear then our stories will be overshadowed by the Holocaust experts' musings and ruminations. I and other survivors who chose to put our stories down on paper are the only ones who can tell you what is was truly like to be caught in the best orchestrated genocide that human beings have yet seen. It is all well and good to be stimulated intellectually on the reasons why the Holocaust occurred, but it does allow you to stay detached emotionally, which cripples the impact. It's highly doubtful anyone who picks up a book on the Holocaust is a person who will join in on the next genocide, but will they be motivated to take some kind of action to help stop or prevent it? If your heart has been moved, your guts have punched, by words that transported you into the shoes of a soul who watched family and friends murdered in front of them then you might be more motivated to take some kind of action when you see a report on CNN about mass murder in some remote part of the world. Even if it's just e-mails to inform friends.