Holocaust survivor remembers: 'All ­Nazis weren't bad'

Beth Duckett | The Arizona Republic

PHOENIX -- George Kalman was only 9 years old when his family got the order to leave their Hungarian village on a rail car in 1944.

On that hot summer day more than 70 years ago, ­Kalman was among 81 Jews squeezed into a cattle car with nowhere to sit, no bathroom, no water and no food. The worst part, he said, was the lack of air.

"We were suffocating, because there were only tiny windows in there," Kalman said.

Kalman, 80, his mother and grandfather were later transported to a farming and slave labor camp in Austria, which the Soviet army liberated 10 months later.

Kalman, a Phoenix resident, speaks regularly to groups about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.

On Friday, he will be the guest speaker at Beth Ami Temple's Yom Ha'Shoah service in Paradise Valley.

Yom Ha'Shoah, also called the Holocaust Remembrance Day, pays homage to the more than 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust in Europe at the hands of Nazi Germany. The remembrance started Wednesday evening and commemorated the lives and heroism of the Jewish people who died in the Holocaust from 1933 to 1945.

Kalman was among the lucky ones, and for many reasons.

"We had been living in a primitive country, in the boonies," Kalman said. "We didn't have running water ... the houses were built from mud bricks, one street was paved. It was very primitive, which made it much easier to get used to the concentration camp compared to those living in the city."

Kalman's mother, Berta, grew up about 30 miles from the Austrian labor camp, so her dialect and customs were similar to the Nazis', and she was treated well, he said.

"My mother got a job working as a maid for a high-ranking Nazi official. The Nazi official was very, very nice to my mother," Kalman said. "My mother was an excellent cook, and they appreciated that. ... She also was a dressmaker, a seamstress."

At the camp of 35 prisoners, Kalman took care of farm animals, harvested vegetables and "essentially did farm work."

"It didn't have guards, they didn't have dogs, they didn't have barbed wire," he said, describing the camp. "We were not allowed to talk to the local people, and they were also not allowed to talk to us."

On the morning of April 2, 1945, Kalman ­noticed the first Soviet soldier enter the camp.

That moment he felt "we were free," he said.

Kalman and his family returned to the Hungarian village and met one of his uncles, who had survived a forced labor camp. His father and ­another uncle did not ­survive, he said.

Hungary was first a democracy but later came under communist rule. In 1956, the borders opened up during a revolution, which is "when a huge number of people left the country."

Kalman landed in Vienna, Austria, and joined with students recruited by Canada. He said the country wanted "young students, young healthy people."

In his early 20s, he moved to Montreal. He later became a gardener in Ontario, working alongside Japanese people who had been forced into relocation camps in the United States during World War II.

"They were very sympathetic to me and very helpful," he said.

Kalman attended McGill University in Montreal but didn't speak any English. He struggled but managed to earn a degree in science, working for companies in Baltimore, Minneapolis and Colorado Springs, he said. In 1996, he moved to ­Arizona and worked for Motorola before retiring.

Kalman speaks to ­students often and is open to all questions, even those about denying the Holocaust.

"I want to talk about it," he said. "Where did you hear it? Why do you say that?"

When asked the question about whether the Holocaust really occurred, Kalman said he points to the extensive collection of Holocaust archives in the German town of Bad Arolsen. The 30 million documents take up about 16 miles of shelves with information about victims, he said.

"For those people who deny the Holocaust, that is not enough though," he added.

A speaker for the Phoenix Holocaust Survivors Association, Kalman likes to tell people that "all ­Nazis weren't bad."

"There were very good Nazis, but also there were a lot of nasty, rude torturer Nazis," he said.

He also likes to encourage his listeners to not be afraid to speak up during bad times, even if they are in the minority.

He quotes the Rev. Martin Niemoller, a German pastor, on the rise of Nazism:

"In Germany, the Nazis came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time, there was no one left to speak for me.''