"I have survived," was the message Holocaust survivor Tobias Guttmans powerfully stressed to more than 80 engrossed listeners last night in a speech describing his struggle before and after liberation from Nazi concentration camps.
Guttmans, a German Jew now living in West Lebanon, relayed the account of his imprisonment in Auschwitz and Dachau, two of the largest Nazi concentration camps, during World War II and his ensuing struggle working as a chef to raise six children.
Guttmans, who is 75 years old,tells the story of his struggle to students in the Upper Valley area because "people are interested to know." He said discussion about the Holocaust has increased over the last several years.
"Learn what you can ... I couldn't. I was interrupted. Don't give up schooling," he told the students in the audience in his strong German accent.
Guttmans said in 1942 the Gestapo, the Nazi German police force, took him, his father and his brother away from his mother and sisters to Auschwitz under the pretense that they were going to work. Guttmans, who was then in his 20s, was still in school at the time.
"The hardest part is when we got to Auschwitz," Guttmans said emotionally. "I was separated from my brother and father." Guttmans was later sent to Dachau where he spent two and a half years. A Polish worker told him that his brother and father were sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz.
He said "it took many years ... still lots of pain," before he could relate the story of his years at Auschwitz.
The most outwardly visible reminder of Guttmans' time at Dachau is his left hand on which he is missing parts of his fingers.
Guttmans said he had worn a ring given to him by his mother on that hand. One of the Nazi guards decided he wanted the ring that was stuck on Guttmans' swollen finger, so he cut off the fingers to get it, Guttmans said.
He spoke of the food he received. "We get warm water ... and a loaf of bread ... I was hungry most the time."
"You can't open mouth. They beat you up," he said before describing his less visible injuries. "I still have a hard time lifted my right arm."
Throughout the retelling of a story that Guttmans has obviously shared many times, he often repeated, "but I survived somehow."
On April 29, 1945, American soldiers liberated the surviving prisoners at Dachau. "It happened suddenly," Guttmans said.
He also said prisoners were surprised that some American soldiers were black because the Germans in the camp didn't know there were African Americans.
"I was three days unconscious ... We afraid to talk to anybody," he said. The survivors of Dachau did not understand the message that they were free because it was announced to them in English, Guttmans said.
But his liberation, once realized, was accompanied with much sadness because of the death of his brother and father.
"I have made it ... I wish I never had made it," Guttmans said.
After the war Guttmans said he attended a culinary school in Zurich, Switzerland for two years. During that time he went back to Germany to get married.
Even though the horrors of the war had ended, Guttmans said his life was filled with the struggles of adapting to peacetime.
He said he worked as a chef for American officers. When he started his job, he was surprised to find only canned foods on the shelf with unreadable, English labels.
In order to cook the way he had learned, he asked to borrow a jeep and traded canned coffee to local farmers for fresh ingredients.
Guttmans said the soldiers liked his food and requested Sunday brunches where they even brought their families.
After immigrating to America in the 1950s, Guttmans said he worked in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City.
"I will never go in big city again," he said, saying he was mistreated because he did not speak English well. He said this is part of the reason he likes West Lebanon so much.
Guttmans supported his family by traveling around the New England area working at culinary schools and officer's clubs.
He also said he was very devoted to his six children after his wife passed away in 1963.
Cosponsored by Dartmouth Hillel and the International Office, the speech took place in the Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences.
