February 2009
Article published in "OS", no. 2, 2009

“I summoned up the courage to avoid revenge and hatred”

At the conclusion of a meeting at the International Youth Meeting House in O?wi?cim, Alex Deutsch described himself by saying, “I am a happy, contented person.” The words that the 96-year-old survivor enunciated in his calm, quiet voice made all the more of an impression because his audience must still have had clear images in their minds of scenes from a long, hard life after which only a strong, decent man could call himself happy.

Deutsch and his wife Doris joined representatives of the Adolf Bender Center in St. Wendell at the opening of an exhibition, titled I Survived Auschwitz, on the subject of his life. Susanne Schmidt prepared the exhibition.
During the opening, Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Deputy Director Krystyna Oleksy thanked Deutsch for his indefatigable efforts to convey the truth about Auschwitz. “The staff and volunteers at the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust have devoted their time to collecting the greatest possible number of memoirs and accounts by former prisoners,” she said. “These tens of thousands of pages of text are and will continue to be an inexhaustible source of knowledge. They have enormous importance in educational work, like your own work, for which I would like to express heartfelt gratitude.”

The most significant event of the evening was a discussion between Deutsch and Christoph Heubner, the deputy chairman of the International Auschwitz Committee.

Listening to Alex Deutsch, there can be no doubting that hard times are a forge of character, especially of all that is best and most enduring in a man’s character. The things that Deutsch had to contend with would have been beyond most people’s capacities—and this applies not only to his two years in Auschwitz. Deutsch was a German Jew who worked as a baker but dreamed of being a hairdresser; for years, it has been his vocation to serve as a guide for young people. His passage through life seems to have purified him. Reconciled to people and the world in his old age, he says calmly, with a smile, “I have found internal peace, in order to be able to create a new life for myself.” Auschwitz claimed the life of his wife and little son, stripped him of the home he never went back to, and left him unable for many years to live in the homeland to which he could only bring himself to return many years later. When he did go back to Germany, he not only embraced the country anew, but also began playing an active role in transforming it by breaking down barriers and stereotypes, and by forgiving. “I will continue with my task until my dying breath,” he said at the IYMH, without it sounding like idle words. His task is holding meetings with young people, mostly in Germany. He has been doing this consistently since returning to Germany in 1978.

There were tears shed during his discussion with Heubner—not on Deutsch’s face, but on the faces of the young people who listened to him. He reminisced about his childhood, partly spent in an orphanage, about his time in Auschwitz, and about his difficulties adapting to a new life in the USA. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the meeting with Alex Deutsch was a moving history lesson for young people who know about the war only from the pages of history books. Aside from the interesting and illuminating things he said, there was something more: emotion. The emotion could be felt in a very discreet way in Deutsch’s account—it was restrained, and came to the surface only in a delicate wavering of his voice or in slightly prolonged pauses between his phrases. The emotion became powerful only when it penetrated to his listeners. Then, it evoked deep, authentic feelings in them.

Discussion moderator Christoph Heubner did an admirable job of breaking up the gloomier moments by referring to the brighter spots, or to ordinary, everyday life. Listening to Alex Deutsch—both his words, and what he says “between the lines”—it is plain to see that his tragic experiences not only failed to crush him, but in fact strengthened him and furnished him with good humor and a warm, kindly way of relating to others. He tells the young people: “Live for others, and not against them.” When he says this, he is just as credible as when he pays compliments to Polish bread (a subject he knows something about) by saying that it’s almost as good as the bread from Saarland (although it can’t compare with the bread of the pre-digital age, when a baker was a craftsman rather than a mere worker). It is perhaps this ordinariness that, having survived everything he has lived through, has such an effect on his listeners and permits them, despite the gulf in age and life experience, to feel emotionally close to him.

Alex Deutsch is not some superhero. He fulfills the task he has imposed on himself, of bearing witness about Auschwitz. He focuses entirely on his audience. He does not use strong words or bombastic gestures. The most beautiful thought he shared that evening was something that he said modestly, even shyly. “I summoned up the courage to avoid revenge and hatred,” he remarked. “When an opportunity for vengeance arose, I thought: but maybe that was one of those people who helped the prisoners. And then I was incapable of harming that person.” Yet he says himself that, when he learned that his wife and little son had died in the gas chamber, it was precisely hatred and the desire for revenge that motivated his determination to survive Auschwitz in defiance of all the odds. Survival was, in turn, nothing more than the first step towards building a new life in the USA, where he had no relatives, no home, no roots, and did not even know the language. It has been a long road and it continues to throw up new challenges even today; even though it was never again as dramatic, it was never easy.
When Alex Deutsch and his second wife, Dvora Spiller, finally made a home for themselves in St. Louis, race riots broke out in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. That was when, for the second time, Alex Deutsch lived through mindless hatred based on nothing but prejudice—this time, prejudice about skin color. His wife’s death in 1977 came as yet another blow.
These painful experiences marked out a new turning in his life’s story. He returned to Germany in 1978 and, yet again, embarked upon a new life. With Doris, the widow of his fellow Auschwitz survivor Karl Loeb, he took up residence in Neunkirchen-Wiebelskirchen, in the Saarland. A new chapter began: his meetings with young people to share the truth about Auschwitz, and the deeper truth about people. People like him, who can both remember and forgive, who can lose everything and embark upon a new life with unshakable hope and warmth, while reaching out and making contact with others.

Joanna Kleczar

Alex Deutsch

• Born on September 7, 1913 in Berlin as the eighth child of the tailor Josef Deutsch and Rosa Hahn Deutsch. After his father’s death, the family’s desperate financial situation led to Alex and his younger brother ending up in a Jewish orphanage in Berlin. In 1928, he was apprenticed as a baker. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, he joined a Jewish association that helped people to emigrate. It was there that he met his future wife, Thea Cohn. They married in 1938.
• A ban on the employment of Jews in the food industry forced him to give up his trade as a baker in 1935. He worked as a messenger and as a street-sweeper. In 1937, he was assigned to forced labor on a wrecking crew in Berlin. He worked in coal mines in 1938-1939. His son Dennis was born in 1940.
• On February 27, 1943, the SS detained him and then sent him, along with 1,700 other people, on a transport that arrived in Auschwitz Birkenau on March 1. Thea Deutsch and their son had traveled on an earlier transport, and were killed in the gas chamber upon arriving. Alex Deutsch was assigned to labor in Auschwitz III-Monowitz.
• Along with other prisoners fit for labor, he was forced to march to Gliwice in January 1945. Those who survived were taken by train to Buchenwald, and from there to the Langenstein-Zwieberge camp.
• On April 20, 1945—five days after the SS guards fled—Alex Deutsch and three others were found by the Americans. He decided against returning to Berlin. He lived briefly in Luxembourg, and then in Belgium and France. He arrived in New York on June 25, 1946. He joined his brother Hermann, who had emigrated before the war, in St. Louis. He began working as a baker, later becoming a partner and then the sole owner of a Dutch Boy Supermarket. He married Dvora Spiller in 1948. In 1951, he became an American citizen. Two years later, he and Dvora adopted a three-year-old boy. Alex got out of the grocery business in 1972 and worked until retirement at a Mount City Trust Company branch.
• Returning to Germany in 1978, he married Doris, the widow of his friend Karl Loeb, and took up residence in Neunkirchen-Wiebelskirchen. As a witness to a tragic past, he tells young people about his fate as a German Jew in the National Socialist period. His message for the young people is, “do not allow yourself to be driven into hatred and enmity towards others. Learn to live with others, not against them.” A school in the Wellesweiler district of Neuenkirchen was named after him in September 2001. He received the Federal Cross of Merit First Class on November 13, 2007. That same day saw the premiere of a film about him, titled Ich habe Auschwitz überlebt [I survived Auschwitz].

• More about "OS": The Website
• The Magazin: Download a PDF of the issue no. 2, February 2009 [1,1 MB]

back to overview