“If you saw 73-year-old Sigi Hart on the street, he would remind you of your grandfather. He has kind eyes and a sincere sense of humor. The day I met him in his house in Beverly Hills, we sat in his dining room surrounded by pictures of his family, while his grandchildren played in the next room. But Sigi Hart has a story to tell: he is a survivor of the Holocaust. His short-sleeved blue shirt exposed the number on his forearm that was tattooed there by the Nazis.
Sigi was seven when Hitler came to power in 1933. As Hitler made Jews the scapegoat for all of Germany’s problems, Sigi’s friends began to turn against him. They wouldn’t play with him anymore—if they did, they would be beaten up by their peers.
“You’re a Jew, and then you’re a dirty Jew,” said Sigi, describing how quickly attitudes changed towards him.
Soon he wasn’t allowed to sit on public benches, visit public parks or go to the movies. He had to change schools and go to a Jewish school. The Germans even forbade Jews to have pets.
“Everything that’s nice, you couldn’t have,” he said.
Jews became more and more afraid as they noticed neighbors and friends disappearing—they’d be sent to a camp and their ashes would be sent to their wives later without any real explanation.
Sigi was afraid to walk to school by himself—Nazi youth felt entitled to beat up any Jews they came across. He recalls walking home from the temple with his grandfather on a Saturday, carrying his grandfather’s prayer shawl. He and his grandfather moved into the street to avoid Nazi soldiers on the sidewalk. Suddenly, for no reason, the soldiers drew close, pulled night sticks from their boots and beat his grandfather so severely that he had to be hospitalized. And there was no one to complain to, no one to go to.
There was no way for Jewish males to pretend that they weren’t Jews—the Germans would pull down their pants to see if they were circumcised, since only Jews practiced circumcision at that time.
The family fled Germany
November 9, 1938 was a pivotal day for Sigi and his family. It was the night of terror known as “Krystalnacht” when the Germans burned synagogues, looted Jewish stores and destroyed Jewish property. Afterwards, Jewish business owners were required to put signs on their business stating that they were Jewish-owned to discourage people from shopping there.
After Krystalnacht Sigi’s dad decided it was time for them to leave Germany. And for the next seven years, his family was on the run (although in the end there was nowhere to run to).
Sigi’s father left first for Belgium and sent a letter with instructions on where to go. A few days later, Sigi and his family took the train to Belgium, taking nothing with them to avoid suspicion. They threw their apartment key out of the train window. Sigi was only 14 years old. They settled in Belgium where Sigi and his siblings went to school and sang in the local synagogue’s choir.
In 1940 when the Germans invaded Belgium, his family joined 2,000 other Jews on an eight-day train voyage to a town on the southern border of France. There they were secure for a while.
Then the Nazis told the French government to deport all the Jews to Germany. Sigi and his family were taken to the train station, boarded a train and transported to a camp. But they managed to escape and returned to the town, where a sympathetic French family hid them in their home for 15 months. Sigi worked on some of the local farms and was paid with food. The people in the town knew that there were Jews but they kept quiet about it. Somehow word got out and the mayor of the town approached them and told them that they had to relocate again. This time they were taken to a city where there was a concentration camp and they were forced to live there.
When a rumor spread that the Germans were approaching, his family fled into the mountains. They lived up in the Pyrenées for six weeks, sleeping outside. Twice a week Sigi, who was the strongest of the family, went down with a sack to gather potatoes and corn. Then one morning they were captured by the French police. His parents cried, begging them not to report them but to no avail.
The French police took them to four different camps and his family became separated. His father somehow escaped; his sister was separated from Sigi and his younger brother; his mother caught typhoid fever and was left to die in one of the camps. He and his brother started working on a French farm. His father located them and sent them a letter with money telling them to go to the French Riviera, which was under Italian control. At that time the Italians were more tolerant of Jews than the French, Sigi explained.
Sigi and his brother took the train to the Riviera, speaking French to each other on the train so no one would think they were Jewish, and luckily no one asked to see any papers. In the Riviera they found their father and sister. The Italians sent them with 800 other Jews to a village in the Alps, where they had to report to the local Italian police station, but were not mistreated otherwise. The French tried to get them to go to their police station, where they would be turned in to the Germans, Sigi remembered with anger.
They had to walk over the mountains
But when Italy fell to Germany in 1943, the Italians who protected them returned to Italy. The 800 Jews who lived in the village, including Sigi and his family, decided to walk over the Alps to Italy. Many died during the journey. After walking for three days and three nights, they reached the Italian border which was already occupied by the Germans. Some were so exhausted that they walked towards the Germans and ultimately to their deaths.
Sigi and his family refused to go down. His sister and her boyfriend left for Rome to get closer to the Americans. And then his brother, his father and he tried to do the same. Sigi’s father sold his wedding ring and his gold teeth to help them survive. In Genoa a priest helped them with money and food. They then moved on to Florence where another priest let them stay with other Jews in an old movie house. The females were hidden in convents.
One day at five in the morning, the German and the Italian police came. In the commotion, his brother ran up the stairs and hid under one of the seats in the balcony. Everyone else was taken to a military base in Florence. Sigi noticed a place near the outdoor bathroom where he thought they could escape over the wall. After talking to his father and friend, late in the afternoon they all went to the bathroom. His friend and his father made it over the wall, but before Sigi could join them, a guard came and asked Sigi what he was doing. He answered that he had just come to use the rest room.
His father waited for him on the other side of the wall for the rest of the night, but Sigi never came. That night everyone on the base was loaded into train cars. After eight days, they arrived at Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. Out of 1,300 people, the Germans picked 14 men—among them Sigi and a family friend—and asked them to step aside. The rest of the people were loaded into trucks.
The officials asked the 14 men if they had any medical problems. His friend’s father answered that he had a shoulder operation a year ago and that hurt from time to time. Then he too was loaded into the trucks. The people in the trucks were driven to their deaths either in the gas chambers or in the ovens. The remaining 13 were put to work in a chemical company, where they were beaten with ax handles and whips for the slightest imperfection.
By this time Sigi was 17 years old; he had no idea where his family was or if they were dead or alive. One day they heard cannons—the Russians were approaching. The Germans took them out of the camp and forced them to march two days and three nights. This later came to be called the Death March because if anyone was not strong enough to walk, they were shot.
“A lot of people were killed,” Sigi remembered.
They marched into Germany where Sigi worked in a factory making V1 and V2 rockets, the same ones used to bomb England. He worked there for three months. By this time he was fluent in several languages including German and French. Imprisoned among the Jews in the work camps were Polish criminals. They were allowed to receive packages from their relatives but they had to write their letters in German and very few of them were able to do that. So Sigi wrote the letters and in turn he would get food from the packages. If it wasn’t for this food, he would have starved to death.
The frontline was getting closer
Three months after starting work in the rocket factory, they heard cannons. This time it was the Americans that were approaching. They were transported to another location, but before they left 120 men were lined up and hung as “war conspirators.” They remained at the new location for two weeks without food. Soon they started eating whatever they could find—leaves, grass, even leather. On the morning of April 15, 1945, six years after escaping to Belgium, Sigi was liberated by the British. When the tanks rolled up, the prisoners thought it was some kind of a cruel joke. The Germans had always told them that if anything happened, they would shoot them before they moved on. “We thought we were dreaming,” Sigi recalled.
After liberation, he told officials that he was French and went to France to look for his family.
In the train station in France he recognized a girl who gave him the incredible news: “Your mother’s alive. Your father’s alive.”
His mother had survived typhoid in the care of a French woman. His father had survived by hiding in an convalescent home for the elderly. His sister had pretended to be a nun in an Italian convent, then fled to America on a special refugee ship. His brother, who survived in an orphanage, was in Palestine.
He finally saw his mother
He telegraphed his mother, who had been told he was dead. He went to see her. Tears came to his eyes as he remembered how his mom collapsed in his arms when they hugged.
But he did not want to stay in Europe. “I was so afraid to be in France. I always thought maybe he [Hitler] comes back,” Sigi said.
He registered with the Jewish Brigade and went to Palestine, proudly wearing a uniform with the six-pointed star of David—the same symbol that the Nazis had used to isolate and abuse the Jews.
He went on to fight for Israel in 1948 when it was attacked by five of its Arab neighbors—Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq—after British troops withdrew. This became known as the Liberation War of Israel.
He went on to marry and have a son. He fought again in the 1956 Sinai War, when British, French and Israeli forces attacked and captured the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. In 1957, he joined his sister in the U.S., where he had a daughter and worked for a manufacturing company.
In 1970, his entire family came together for the first time for their parent’s 50th anniversary. His friend (the one who escaped with his father in Italy) also moved to America where he became a successful movie photographer. Sigi and he remained close friends until last year when he passed away.
Though he celebrated the anniversary of his liberation as a second birthday every April, he never told his children his entire story. When his children asked him what the number on his arm was, he would say that it was his phone number. “We never talked about the past,” said Sigi.
After seeing Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” the story of a German who helped some Jews survive by employing them in his factory, Sigi began to think more about the past. He decided to tell his story to the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a project started by Spielberg to record the stories of as many survivors as possible.
Sigi’s children learned the entire story when they saw the tape of his interview. Now he volunteers regularly at the foundation. He answers the phones and often is the first contact when other survivors call. He also appeared with Spielberg on the Oprah Winfrey show to talk about his experience and the Shoah Foundation.
He wants the world to learn from this. “People should learn. They should know how to live together. We are all children of God. Different religions shouldn’t matter,” he said.”