So went the detritus of Auschwitz, after the bodies and those barely alive were taken away.
There were the soiled, striped pants that made up the camp uniform and the bullwhips wielded with glee by the guards.
There were the human-sized ovens, the Zyklon B showers and passports emblazoned with a single, searing “J.”
There were the dinged-up tin cups and the bent, rusted forks — the one-way archeology of an already lost generation, trying, so desperately, to survive its persecution.
There was also something else.
Lee Goldman Kikel would have to cross a time-bridge, say, in the manner of an old Kurt Vonnegut novel about World War II, to get to what it was.
She was going to transcribe the 10 cassette tapes recorded by her late father, for a book he wanted to write detailing his time in Auschwitz.
That was when he was Mieczslaw Goldman, who was born Jewish, into a loving family in Lodz, Poland.
He was 16 in 1944 when the soldiers finally came for him, his parents and his brothers and sisters.
Goldman was oldest of seven children, and only he and a brother survived Auschwitz. As many as 70 other relatives perished in the camp.
He came to the U.S. and settled in Pittsburgh in 1950.
Physically, he was still feeling the ravages of Auschwitz, but he set his spirit free.
He married an American girl, and started a family and a business.
A story, to be told
He began speaking into the microphone in the late 1970s, with the book idea, which he would, he said, “dedicate to the children of the world.”
By then, he was Melvin Goldman, a prosperous merchant who owned and operated a jewelry store in Pittsburgh’s largely Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood.
His daughter didn’t even own a machine to play the tapes.
Mr. Goldman died in 1996, and it was 2015 when she warmed to the project, which included procuring the increasingly rare, analog-artifact.
“I had to go shopping around for one,” she said Monday, at WVU’s Mountainlair student union.
She popped in the first tape, and her tears unspooled with it.
There was her dad’s loving, warm voice, with his fun accent and charmingly fractured English that sometimes belied the seriousness of the telling.
“After I got over crying, she said, “I went to work.”
Monday was all about the voices of Auschwitz.
It was the 75th anniversary of the liberation by Russian soldiers of Auschwitz and its sister Birkenau camp in Poland.
Of live streams and stirred awakenings
In Germany on Monday, more than 200 Auschwitz survivors spoke at the camp entrance with its grimly ironic sign, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” which loosely translates to, “Work Sets You Free.”
Death was the only thing freeing about Auschwitz before those Russian soldiers stormed the gates.
It was a cruel and coldly efficient factory of death, where more than 1 million Jews were gassed from 1933 to 1945, the years of the Third Reich.
Auschwitz even set a grim record — killing 12,000 Jews in just one day.
In the Mountainlair, WVU’s Pi Lambda Phi committee arranged for the live stream from Germany to be carried in the Shenandoah Room.
WVU’s Lisa Di Bartolomeo, a literature and linguistics professor who teaches in the Department of World Languages, helped organize the gathering on campus.
She has also studied and taught in Poland and the Czech Republic, where the ripples of the Holocaust are still felt.
The idea, she said, was to bring the enormity of it home through first-hand accounts of the survivors who are still with us.
Chantelle Friend, a WVU psychology major from Oakland, Md., who volunteered at the event said that approach caused her to spiral in to a subject she didn’t know that much about.
“We only touched on this in middle school and high school,” she said.
“Now, I’m reprocessing everything.”
The humanity of Mr. Goldman
Kikel, meanwhile, completed her father’s book, after all.
“Perseverance: One Holocaust Survivor’s Journey from Poland to America,” is the title of the work, which was recently published by Morgantown’s Populore Publishing Co.
Melvin Goldman even got top billing on the cover.
The book is interspersed with her writing, plus the transcribed work of her father’s tape recorder sessions from the 70s.
She knows the racist hatred that allowed the Holocaust to happen still abounds in the world.
That’s even in Squirrel Hill, where several people died in a mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue there last October.
Kikel also knows, she said, that her father got the last word on the Final Solution.
“He was never bitter, and he could have been really bitter,” she said.
“But he was always so positive and optimistic. He survived, and he made a life in America. I’m truly blessed.”
And the book is dedicated to the world’s children, “in hope for peace and harmony.”
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