l:45-3:05 pm Sunday, January l6, 2005 - Congregation Beth Israel
Stories Told and Written of the Holocaust
Edith Eva Eger, Ph.D. - "The Story of My Experience As a Holocaust Survivor: From Victimization to Empowerment"
Professor Randy Sturman - "Law, Narratives Through Medicine and the Holocaust: The Influence of the Holocaust on End-of-Life Decisions in Israel"
Lou Dunst - "The Story of a Holocaust Survivor in Auschwitz, Matthausen, and My Near Escape from Death"
Merle Fischlowitz, Ph. D. - "Poems about the Holocaust: A Reading"

Holocaust survivor

I, Lou Dunst, was born on March 11, 1926 in Jasina, Czechoslovakia, the youngest child of Marcus and Priva Dunst. My family operated a small retail business, selling general merchandise to everyone in that Carpathian Mountain region. Our village was extremely poor. We had no electricity, no running water. We went to school in a one-room building where we had to share everything.

I was seven years old in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. In 1935 the infamous Nuremburg Laws were passed, making Jews "non-Germans" to be rounded up, tortured and even murdered. The Nuremburg Laws came into full force and effect with Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938), The Night of the Broken Glass. Hitler's power spread in Germany, in Austria (Anschluss, 1938) and in Czechoslovakia (1939) when German and Czech Nazis gave the Sudetenland to Germany outright, and paved the way for the rump Czech state to be destroyed by the Nazis. Ukrainians took over Jasina on the condition that they slaughter the local Jewish population.

In 1940, all Jewish males in my village of 14 years and older were taken as slave labor. We were later transported in boxcars to the Mateszalka Ghetto (Hungary), and detained until transported to the Auschwitz-Biirkenau complex in Poland. In Auschwitz, we were assigned to Mauthausen in Central Austria for "liquidation." At Mauthausen we were locked inside the gas chamber. Because the fuel to burn our bodies was too expensive, we were let out and told we would be made to "vanish without further expense to The Reich." We were given slave labor numbers [mine is 68122], and sent to Ebensee, where we worked in an underground factory which manufactured armaments to be used against the Allies.

In 1945 we were again scheduled for death. Living skeletons, we were stacked next to the crematoria to be burned alive. The Nazis, in an effort to destroy evidence, brought in townspeople with rifles and dogs to chaise us back into the tunnels, telling us that the Americans would kill us if we didn't' "hide." In truth, the guards had set the tunnels with dynamite to blow us up, but were surprised by the Americans. On May 6, 1945, we were liberated by General Patton's Third Army.

My siblings and I survived the war. We made our way to America, where I am now a successful businessman. I am active in civic and Jewish Community affairs and speak extensively on The Holocaust and related topics to civic and educational groups the world over.

You may reach me by mail or phone at the following address and phone number: 3635 Seventh Avenue, #13-D, San Diego, CA 92103. Telephone: 619-297-1598