"You've Got to Go On With Life:" Holocaust Survivor Speaks to Students

Holocaust survivor Sam Harris says his best memory of Northbrook is the day his adoptive parents brought him into town to his new home on Hickory Lane.

“I remember driving up Hickory Lane; the daffodils were in bloom,” he told students at Wednesday. Harris, who founded the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie and served as president for several years, gave his speech as part of at the school, a series of speeches and demonstrations set up to bring history alive for students.

Already fluent in Polish, German and Yiddish when he enrolled in seventh grade at Crestwood School (which closed in 1979), Harris had to learn English quickly. Equally important, he also learned how to play baseball, hockey and basketball, making friends in the process.

“It was the first time I started to enjoy life,” he said.

Harris’ recollections of life in Northbrook, following his parents’ death in the Holocaust, lie in stark contrast to his memories of the years he spent in a ghetto in Poland and then in a concentration camp.

Before the war, “I had a very happy life in a small town very much like Northbrook,” said Harris. The youngest of seven children, he was born Szlamek Rzeznik in May 1935 in Deblin, Poland. In 1939, when World War II broke out, Harris was four years old.

When the Nazis came and occupied his hometown, he said, “My life changed forever.”

Soldiers came to his house and took his father to the woods, where they beat him with sticks until he passed out, Harris recalled. Then they formed a ghetto in the town, restricting where Jews could live and beating anyone who tried to leave. They also limited the food available.

“I was always, always so hungry,” Harris said. “It was a terrible thing to be so hungry. I’d go days without food.”

In 1942, the Nazis showed up with trucks and cattle cars, planning to round up the Jews in the central square of the ghetto and then deport them to Treblinka, a Nazi death camp.

“If somebody didn’t go fast enough, they’d either shoot them or stab them,” Harris said, estimating that 600 to 800 people from his hometown died that day. As he and his family, friends and neighbors lined up in the central square, he remembered that his parents hid him between their bodies. Somehow, he said, he felt like he would survive.

“It was a feeling that I would be OK,” he said. “It was almost like a guardian angel.”

Then his father pushed him out of line and told him to run and hide behind a nearby pile of bricks. When he did so, Harris recalled, he found one of his sisters already hiding there.

They watched as the Nazis forced everyone who was lined up in the square to march toward the cattle cars.

“That was the last I saw my parents and my sisters and my brothers and my friends,” said Harris. “In my mind, they’re still marching.”

His parents and four of his siblings died in Treblinka, a death camp where more than 800,000 people were killed between 1942 and 1943. Harris and two of his sisters escaped the Nazi roundup in their town by hiding in a nearby barn.

When Harris and his sisters returned from the barn to the ghetto, he saw what he thought was a pile of garbage.

“Those were many of our neighbors, one on top of the other,” he said. They had all been shot.

After the deportation, one of his sisters was enlisted in a Nazi work camp, where she hid Harris as well. He remembered eating bread made of sawdust and soup made with horsemeat.

“You were lucky if you got a piece of horsemeat,” he said.

One day, the Nazis transported everyone in the work camp to a factory in another city, where the Nazis needed workers to make bullets. Harris and his sister were forced into a cattle car with dozens of other people and rode for three days without food or water.

“I was in the belly of a monster, that’s how terrible it was,” he said.

When they got out, the Nazis discovered that Harris had been hiding with his sister all along. That was not allowed, he said, because he was too young to work. One of the soldiers pulled him aside and then kicked him in the chest.

“I still remember that big shiny boot coming at me,” he said.

Along with four other children who had also been in the cattle cars, Harris was taken away from his sister and sent to a concentration camp. When the giant gates opened and he and the other children walked inside, he remembered that the people inside were so happy to see children that they lifted them up and handed them from one to another.

“It was right then that I felt that I owed it to the world to tell what really happened,” he said.

In January 1945, Harris was liberated by the Russian Army and sent to an orphanage and finally to Vienna, Austria, where his older sister lived. She decided it would be good for him to go to the United States, he said. He rode over on a ship called the Ernie Pyle and was placed in a foster home downtown before he was adopted.

Northbrook, he said, was “the best place on earth for me.”

Today, one of Harris’ surviving sisters lives in Buffalo Grove, while the other remains in Vienna. He also has a sister from his adoptive family, who lives in Highland Park.  

Following his speech, students got the chance to ask questions. One person wanted to know what he would have brought with him from his home in Poland, if he could have kept anything. He thought for only a few seconds before answering that he would have liked to have photographs of his family, friends and hometown.

Another student asked if he would ever forget what had been done to him and his family.

“I don’t want to forgive those guilty ones,” he said. But, he emphasized, “You’ve got to go on with life.”

“If I had hatred,” he said, “I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”