Oldest Concentration Camp Survivor

[ObiwanGinobili]

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Will of oldest known Holocaust survivor remains unbroken

By Anita Stackhouse-Hite, The Porterville Recorder

He was beaten by the Gestapo in Linz, starved by the concentration camp henchmen of Hitler's Third Reich, left for dead by the Nazis and had his life threatened while the steel barrel of a pistol pressed against his temple.

Freedom - relief from unspeakable torture - was his for the taking. All Leopold Engleitner had to do was sign a do ent that said he denounced his faith.

Sixty years later, 101-year-old Engleitner on Saturday rode his wheelchair into a local congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses wearing a dark suit and a broad smile. His neatly combed white hair stood out against the backdrop of his suit. His head lifted high; his blue-grey eyes widened when he spoke in strong voice.

“I could not do that,” he said. “No matter what they did to me, I knew Jehovah God would take care of me, even to death.”

Through an interpreter, Engleitner told of the horrors he experienced in three Nazi concentration camps - Buchenwald, Niederhagen and Ravensbruck.

His crime? He was a minister, one of Jehovah's Witnesses, then called International Bible Students.

Engleitner is the oldest known Holocaust survivor. He suffered at the hands of relentless purveyors of death because of his “faith in Jehovah God and an unbroken will” to serve him.

Today, he travels to college campuses, including a visit last week to Stanford University, and to Holocaust museums across America. He reminds young people about the importance of standing up for what you believe, said his interpreter, Robert Wagemann.

“Many people, when they hear the word Holocaust, think of the six million Jews who died,” Wagemann said. “They are surprised to hear that in addition to the Jews, eight million other people were killed in those camps. Russians, sexuals, Gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses were favorite targets of Hitler. Leopold [Engleitner] is proof that, with faith in God, you can survive the worst evil. He shares that message with those who listen to him, especially young people.”

Engleitner endured unimaginable pain and suffering during the war years at the hands of Adolf Hitler's troops. Once, lagging behind in the line of concentration camp prisoners, he was kicked between the legs from behind by an SS officer. The force of the blow caused his body to crumble. He fell to the ground writhing in pain. His right testicle was crushed.

Despite the indignities he experienced, Engleitner is not bitter. Frequently he throws back his head and laughs out loud. He unleashes a repertoire of jokes as often as he can.

“I have no reason to be bitter about what happened,” he told his audience of more than 250, with a smile. “I knew serving Jehovah God would bring with it persecutions, but I had to obey God rather than men.”

Engleitner was born July 23, 1905. His life of dedication, integrity and survival has been told in his biography “Unbroken Will: The Extraordinary Courage of an Ordinary Man,” by Bernhard Rammerstorfer. The book has become a do entary, produced by Rammerstorfer, 38.

A second do entary is being filmed as he travels. So, in addition to Rammerstorfer and his wife Beate, 29, a crew of cameramen and Wagemann accompany him across the country.

Rammerstorfer met the elderly man while both were at a health spa in Austria. Engleitner had pneumonia at the time.

“I started to talk with him and was amazed at this story, the things he suffered in order to be faithful to God, and yet, his spirits were so good,” Rammerstorfer said. “He was not angry or bitter with anyone. He'd been alone since 1981 when his wife Teresia died, but he was an inspiration to everyone who came in contact with him. We cannot call him simply an ordinary man. He is an ordinary man with extraordinary courage.”

To demonstrate his point, Rammerstorfer showed a DVD of a short excerpt of the do entary. The images showed Engleitner as a young man in Austria and the German concentration camps he and millions of others endured. In one segment of the excerpt, Engleitner held a striped uniform with a purple triangle used to identify Jehovah's Witnesses in the camps.

“We were among the few that could be trusted to shave the SS officers,” he said through Wagemann. “They knew we would not harm them because of our beliefs.”

On Oct. 9, 1939 Engleitner was imprisoned Buchenwald. On March 7, 1941, he was transferred to Niederhagen. In the spring of 1943 he was transported by train to Ravensbruck. Sick, weak and his body full of ulcers, Engleitner was released from Ravensbruck on July 15, 1943, under the condition that he would only work in the field of agriculture.

Before the war

The story of his suffering because of his spiritual way of life began before the alliance between Austria and Germany came about. He was baptized in a wash tub in May 1932. He was 27. Before Hitler's death machines started to roll, Engleitner five times was arrested by local police in and around his home town of Bad Ischl, in upper Austria. The charges included “libeling and offending” the religions of Austria, being a “public danger” and peddling without a license as he went about declaring “the good news about God's Kingdom.”

Austria was a country with religious freedom at the time, but local police regularly arrested him anyway. Once, he said, a judge told him he had “one foot in the grave” because of his objections to the war.

“If I have one foot in the grave standing here before you,” Engleitner said, “what must it be like for those on the front lines of the war?”

Engleitner's parents were Catholic. They were embarrassed because of his religion, he said. When the Nazis pursued him and he had no place to live, his parents would not allow him to stay with them even though the house they lived in belonged to Engleitner. It was a house he built with his own hands. His parents finally relented, but his stay with them was brief.

Weeks before the war ended, Engleitner found himself living in a hay loft on a friend's farm. It was from there that in April 1945 - two years after his release from Ravensbruck for his religious beliefs - the Austrian government called him to military service, just weeks before World War II ended. It was from there that, as a conscientious objector, Engleitner fled for his life. He lived in a cave in the Schwarzensee alpine forests eating whatever he could forage.

Young and old inspired

In May 1945, Hitler was gone and his war machine dissipated, but Austrian-born Engleitner had lived to give an accounting.

His is an inspirational story, said 20-year-old Cristina Martinez.

“You read about stories like his, or see them on television, but to meet him and hear his story is amazing,” Martinez said. “It's inspirational to me. It shows how much faith he had in Jehovah to help him through all of that.”

What she heard will help her in the days ahead, said Catherine Shepard.

“His story is one of inspiration to all people,” said Shepard, because they can understand what people sometimes have to go through for their faith. “It's faith-strengthening to us because it will help us cope with today's trials. His faith in Jehovah helped him to endure. Our faith will do the same for us.”

“Listening to him was an awesome experience,” said Seth Ramirez, 19. “It was faith-strengthening to me that he could still have love and joy after all he went through. I have no reason to complain.”

Engleitner's zeal for life and nature remains strong. He came to Porterville on his way to Los Angeles to be interviewed on the radio and to give a presentation at the Holocaust Museum of Tolerance. The government of Austria provided partial support for his travels.

His interpreter's son, Frank Wagemann, lives in Springville. Engleitner spent time with the Wagemann family, and went to Camp Nelson to see the “big trees and the birds.”

His message for young people?

“Get to know the Bible and learn what it says the future is for this world,” he said. “This rotten world has nothing to offer but pain. The Bible offers hope.”

[Vashner]

Another great example of why waiting for evil to grow is dumb..

Charles Lindburg was leading "America First" while the Jews where being exterminated via the Final Solution.

Mr Lindburg had the EXACT same arguements made by the general Iraqi anti war movement.....

And he was proven WRONG over time.... VERY wrong... maybe 3-6 million people and over 100,000 US soldiers wrong (caused us to enter war late).

Edit add background info:

On September 11, 1941, Charles Lindbergh appeared in Des Moines, Iowa, to speak on behalf of the isolationist America First Committee. The famous aviator criticized the groups he perceived were leading America into war for acting against the country's interests. He expressed doubt that the U.S. military would achieve victory in a war against Germany, which he said had "armies stronger than our own." The Des Moines speech was met with outrage in many quarters, and Lindbergh was denounced as an anti-Semite. In his hometown of Little Falls, Minnesota, his name was even removed from the town's water tower.

Six years earlier, Lindbergh had moved to England with his wife to escape the publicity surrounding the kidnapping and murder of their infant son. In 1936, he inspected Germany's military aviation program on behalf of the U.S. government, and in August attended the Summer Olympic Games in Berlin as a guests of Nazi Hermann Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe. Impressed by German industry and society under Adolf Hitler, the Lindberghs considered moving to Berlin.

In 1938, Goering presented Lindbergh with the Service Cross of the German Eagle for his contributions to aviation. Returning to America in 1939, Lindbergh became an advocate of American isolationism, but was criticized for his Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitic beliefs.

[JoeChalupa]

Don't spin it Vashner.

[JoeChalupa]

Then it does belong in the political forum.

[ObiwanGinobili]

ok - what does lindberg have to do with this man's story????