Holocaust Survivor Dr. Robert Fisch on Bridging the Gap Between 'We' and 'They'

Interview with Dr. Robert Fisch by Phil Bolsta

 

Dr. Robert Fisch, a native of Hungary, miraculously survived a Nazi war camp, death march, and concentration camp in the German forest. After World War II ended he completed medical school in Hungary, then came to America in 1957. Click here to read about Dr. Fisch’s experiences during the Holocaust.

 
Robert, it's a real privilege to talk to you today. Thank you for joining us.

I'm very glad to be here and I'm very happy to work with you.

 
I'd like to focus on what you're doing now and the lessons you've learned during your 92 years on earth. You've written that you now have a beautiful life. What is your philosophy of life and what do you find meaning and purpose in today?

Well, I think that it would be very easy to say it this way. Marcus Aurelius said that neither the future nor the past you can lose, only the present. It is only meaningful to remember the past if you cannot save the present.

That's basically my principle here. We have to learn from the past. It's for the young people's viewpoint. They have to learn that wars mean losers. The losers are those who were killed on both sides, of course, the widows, and their orphans. To remember the heroes and the martyrs, it will be only meaningful if we conclude that we must never engage in war again.

War is hatred and a means of suppression, and we cannot let the extremists who demand an eye for an eye bring us into war again. We have to end war through human love and compassion, and we must remain human even in inhumane circumstances.

 
What are you finding meaning and purpose in today?

What I try to do is pass along what I learned from the Holocaust, which is probably the most incredible mass murder in the history of the world. Most of the people who are telling their story about the Holocaust talk about those who were killed and all the suffering they went through. For me, that is not my purpose.

For me, the purpose is to convey that even in the worst of circumstances, the goodness of people still shone through. For example, there were Germans who sacrificed their lives in order to help us. The worst people in the world are not your enemy; they just want to just kill you. The worst people are your neighbors who say, “It's not my business.” All the atrocities happened because of that attitude.

The Germans are just as good people and just as bad people as the French, or the Hungarians, or the Norwegians. Everyone in every country needs to understand that they are not separate and isolated from everyone else; we are all a part of a big unit.

Let's assume that you need to have a doctor. Let's say you go to the best medical facility in the United States. What could the doctor do if there's no medication? What could the doctor could do if there's no instruments or nobody sterilized the instruments? Nothing.

We all have to work together, and no one’s responsibility is less important or more important. We all are a part of the whole like a carpet is made up of threads. Without thread there is no carpet, and without carpet the thread has no function.

 
That is a very important and perceptive point: every group of people has both good and bad and they need to speak up. As Edmund Burke so famously said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

I would like to say something about that. None of us chooses our parents; neither do we choose our gender, nationality, race, cultural influence, or religion at birth. We are all marked involuntarily and often permanently.

This accident of birth sets up the inevitable “we” and “they.” In other words, “we” are the good guys and “they” are the bad guys. We are right and others are wrong for one reason only: they are not us. You don’t have to hate your enemy; you can just say “they,” and that’s enough to separate yourself from them, even though you’re not even thinking about hatred… yet.”

There is a great distance between the words “we” and “they” even though “they” may be living right next door or half a world away. No matter where “we” and “they” are located, hatred, discrimination, oppression, and war separate them even further apart, and make them seemingly unbridgeable.

Yet, the truth is everything is connected. Respect, basic happiness, compassion, and so forth. That's what really motivates me. When I talk to young people, or anyone for that matter, I speak very little about what happened to me during the war, how many people died around me, and what took place.

In Germany, in Auschwitz, they killed 30,000 people daily — infants, old men, crippled persons, people who could not work. How could the Germans have 30,000 people daily to kill? Because, the Hungarians, the French, the Norwegians, identified the Jews, put them in a camp, put them in the ghetto, and eventually put them on the train to go to be executed. It was not a German-Jewish issue to me. It is not the Jewish who were the only victims.

I don’t like to use the word “love” to describe how we should feel about people who are different than us. “It says in the Bible to love your neighbors as you love yourself, but that's impossible. You cannot love other people like you love your child. So why don't we just say, “Respect others as you would want to be respected?” I think that would be much easier to do.

 

In the past you've written and spoken extensively about finding value in tragedy, specifically that the Holocaust has taught that love overcomes hate. Have you changed your thinking on that as far as love versus respect?

No, no, no. I think that what I learned from all my experiences… I was a Jew during fascism, a bourgeois under Communism, a rebel defeated in the uprising, and a refugee among the free. I'm a physician and artist. Medicine is an art; indeed, art and medicine are two consequences of the same desire — to sustain life.

I have six values that guide my life. The first is the value of compassion. From my Holocaust experience, I asked what the silent millions who died would have us treat others now? With hate and indifference, the very qualities that led to their demise? Not likely. I believe they would want us to have understanding, compassion, and love.

The second value is equal treatment. A double standard in the way people are treated is the biggest threat to civilization. The third is the value of children. Nothing is more important than the morale and the intellectual education of our future generation. The fourth is the value of humor, which I take very seriously!

The fifth is the value of suffering. Suffering has made me appreciate how precious life is. Hardship made every minute of my life more enjoyable and meaningful. And the sixth is the value of remaining human even in inhumane circumstances.

My most recent book will be used in schools in Austria and Hungary, and it’s receiving broad interest in Germany. We have to learn from the Holocaust, not just remember what happened. What does it mean to remember six million people? It's incredible that so many people were killed, but to me one person is just as important than six million, because simply stated, that person is just like you and me, and just as important.
 

When you’ve gone into school to speak to students about your experiences, what has been their reaction?

Unbelievable. I try to go to schools where the most neglected children are. At one school I went to, one boy was hitting the other as I walked in, and they started to laugh when I started talking to them.

This was not a regular school setup; kids could sit anywhere they wanted to. I told them four things. First, everybody had to sit in front of me. Second, I said, “If any of you are not interested, please leave now.” The third thing I said was, “I am not going to give you a lecture; I'm just going to tell you a story.” The fourth thing I said was that I was with 280 men from 18 to 48 years of age; within three months, only 120 of us had survived.

I told them about Auschwitz, and said, “In one place, one day they killed 30,000 people. Now if you wanted to kill 30,000 people, that means that even if you shot somebody down every 20 minutes, a year later you still wouldn’t have killed 30,000 people.”

I told them about the German soldiers who made us walk for days in a so-called Death March because they didn't want us to be liberated. Sometimes for two days we didn't get any food or anything to drink. Anyone who couldn’t continue was shot in the head. One day a woman started to throw apples to us; you can imagine how much it meant to be able to eat an apple. She was shot right in front of us. I also told them about German citizens running to us to give us water to drink or a slice of bread.

But I'll tell you a story which is absolutely out of this world. This happened in Mauthausen, one of the biggest concentration camps which was originally a political camp for the Germans after the Anschluss.

On February 2, 1945, three months before the end of the Second World War, around 500 prisoners, mostly Soviet officers, broke out of the death block and jumped the barbed wire fence after short-circuiting it with wet blankets. It was the most successful escape ever organized by concentration camp prisoners.

Now let’s assume that the German people living near the camp were mostly very old or very young, and had fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons fighting against the Russians. Suddenly, someone’s knocking on the door and they open it to find a lice-infested, hungry enemy soldier asking for help.

Now, if you want to help this soldier, you have to let him in, undress him, burn his clothes, give him a shower because he’s full of head lice, then give him food and clothes, and hide him, knowing that if the German SS soldiers come and find him, everybody in the house will be shot.

In the manhunt that followed the escape, which was conducted by not only the German SS but also German civilians, 410 Soviet prisoners were caught and executed. British and American prisoners were not shot.

However, eight Soviet officers were saved and later returned to the Soviet Union. This is the most incredible story I have ever heard about the Second World War, because although I might be willing to risk my life to help someone, I know that I would not risk the life of my daughter to save anybody, period.

But the fact that eight Soviet officers were protected and survived is what we should be talking about. Now, I'm not asking anyone to sacrifice their life, but at least we should be human with each other and try to help others when we can.

Recently, when there was flooding in the southern part of this country, instead of trying to help others, many people started stealing computers or televisions from stores. That’s why I think the most dangerous people are not the enemy, because you can be prepared for that. The most dangerous people are the indifferent ones who say, “It's not my business.” That’s what I try to emphasize. We must all be united. As soon as we learn “we” and “they,” it's already settled in people’s minds that they will only be looking after themselves and maybe people who look like them. That’s a tragedy.
 

Many people thought the horrors of World War II would not be seen again, but do you attribute the rising tide of bigotry and hatred we see today, not only in this country but in the world, to this attitude?

Yes, it's getting worse and worse.
 

And that's because of “we” and “they”?

Well, absolutely. What would have happened if I was born in Germany accidentally? Or in Russia accidentally? I would be a Nazi or a communist. I would be whatever my family was because “we” would be the good guys. And when you think that way, you say even God is on your side, and your soldiers would be blessed by the priests or rabbis or whatever because everyone would be thinking, “I love this country so much that I have to die for it.” That's been going on forever, since man lived in caves, and I think that is the tragedy.

Let's say you have a one-and-a-half-year-old little girl who was born here in Minnesota. So the child is now able to walk and say a few words, and she says, “Out, out,” because it's sunny outside. What do you say to the child? “Sorry. you cannot go out.” “Why?” “Because you're not safe.” She doesn't understand it.

As the child grows older, she is shy and intimidated when she’s around other people because she wasn’t allowed to play outside. When you’re at someone else’s house, you say, “Sweetheart, don't worry, this is our friend.” And when you go to church or the synagogue, you say to her, “These are our people.” What you’re teaching at an early age is “we” and “they,” and that is already the source of the tragedy. A child’s education does not start in school, it starts immediately after birth from its parents.
 

Robert, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us today, and thank you for all the beauty and love you have brought to the world in so many ways for so many years. I'm honored to call you my friend.

Thank you so much. I hope I have gotten across my message, which is our purpose in life is to help others and not make exceptions for people who are different from us. Without others, we couldn't do anything in this world.
 

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Dr. Robert O. Fisch, a retired University of Minnesota professor of pediatrics and an international expert on the metabolic disease PKU (phenylketonuria), survived the two most oppressive totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. A Holocaust survivor, he has been knighted in Hungary for his role in the 1956 revolution against communism.

Dr. Fisch is also an accomplished artist. Each segment of his first book, Light from the Yellow Star: A Lesson of Love from the Holocaust, is illustrated with one of his paintings and introduced by one of the biblical quotes carved on the walls of the Jewish Memorial Cemetery for the Martyrs in Budapest, Hungary. The book is distributed at no cost to interested schools through the Yellow Star Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping educate young people about the Holocaust.

Dr. Fisch’s subsequent books include:

Dear Dr. Fisch: Children’s Letters to a Holocaust Survivor
Fisch Stories: Reflections on Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness
The Sky Is Not the Limit
The Metamorphosis to Freedom

Click here to read three poignant excerpts from Fisch Stories that capture the quiet heroism of the father and the loving devotion of the son.