Eugene Black - Survivor of the Holocaust

Eugene at Auschwitz camp

Eugene Black
During the Orientation Seminar of the LFA project, we received a talk from Eugene Black, a holocaust survivor who was born Jeno Schwartz in Munkacs, Czechoslovakia in 1928. He chose to change his name simply from fear of being bullied when living in England because of his foreign name. He had a happy family life before then with 3 sisters, a brother, an orthodox Jewish mother and non-Jewish father. He lived in Hungary for the most part of his childhood until 1944 when he was taken along with his family to Auschwitz Extermination camp, but was separated from his family at the famous 'unloading platform' where the process of selection began. During his time in Poland, he was moved from camp to camp, ending in Bergen-Belsen where he was liberated. Since then, he moved to England (1949) and has tried to live an ordinary life, and has recently shared his experiences with the public in seminars and talks.

Thinking points:
Eugene led a normal, ordinary and secluded life before the Second World War that was cruelly disrupted by the onslaught of the Nazis' regime in Hungary. It is interesting how many people might assume there was a large build-up of persecution until the beginning of the war, but from Eugene we learnt that this was a significant shock and there was a real sense of confusion and incomprehension when he came to be imprisoned in camps in 1944. Indeed, this confusion is yet to end as he is still discovering his past - in 2009 he discovered that his 2 sisters that had been taken to camps had not died in gas chambers, as he had believed for 60 years - and dealing with it. However, his experience can allow us some comprehension and perspective on the Holocaust: having begun to comprehend the damage that was done to him we can put this into a more educated context. Imagine the damage done to Eugene, one person - and multiply this by 6 million. Without looking at it as a statistic, try to envisage the consequential, emotional and physical damage in real terms.

During our discussion, when asked about how he felt when he saw the empty camps where he and many others had suffered, he replied, "but they are not empty - there's thousands of people still there..."

For further information on Eugene's life and videos of his accounts, go to
http://holocaustlearning.org/survivors/eugene-black