Marko Feingold: Holocaust Survivor's Tale of Faith

One of the best sources of information about the Holocaust is from someone who survived it, and we were lucky enough to hear 103 year-old Marko Feingold speak in Salzburg, Austria. The theme of his story was faith, and that eventually good people will be rewarded for their actions. I found an interview with him from 2012 where he describes his story in more detail. Marko was born in Vienna and moved with his brother to Italy in 1932, but was arrested by the Nazis in 1938 while he was visiting his family (Treves-Tchelet). He was weakened by the hard labor and was deemed unfit for work (Treves-Tchelet). He would have been killed by the gas chambers, but the chambers were not built yet and he had to get sent to Dachau and eventually to Buchenwald

I remember a part of his story that he told us in Salzburg where he was sent to the medical tent for an infection on his leg and the doctor wanted to give him an operation that would have killed him. The morning of his operation, the doctor found that his wound was too small to operate on, and he was saved. Every survival story has a small moment in time where the person was close to death but managed to escape. These moments are inspirational and many of the survivors, including Marko, believed that God had saved them. In the years after his liberation, Marko helped provide food for the Jewish refugees and claims that “around 100,000 people managed to go to Israel with my help. Most of them don’t even know that it was me” (Treves-Tchelet). He is also the President of the Jewish community in Salzburg, and works hard to ensure that people understand that the Holocaust was real (Treves-Tchelet). It is inspirational that a man who had lost everything refused to lose hope, and while the memories of the Holocaust still haunt him, he embraces it and is not afraid to tell people the truth about what happened to

Today in Europe, it is considered a crime to publicly deny the Holocaust. The Germans wanted to keep the extermination of Jews a secret from everyone, including their own citizens. Most information about the actions by the SS were spoken, and the written documents were classified as top secret, with most of them being destroyed after the war ended (“Combating”). They spoke using code words, such as “resettlement” meaning forced deportation and “special treatment” meaning killing (“Combating”). They had to do this so that the Jews would not understand what was really happening to them and they would be less likely to stage a full-on resistance. They also used these code words in official documents so that the public would be deceived, and if the Allies had intercepted any documents then they would not understand what was really going on (“Combating”). It makes sense that the Nazis would want to keep this operation a secret, but realistically it is impossible to