What I learned from reading Unstoppable: Siggi Wilzig's Astonishing Journey from Auschwitz Survivor and Penniless Immigrant to Wall Street Legend by Joshua M. Greene.
When people ask me, how did you survive?
I leave out a small thing which isn't really a small thing.
Any survivor who has a heart and brains lives with guilt that they survived and others didn't.
My mother was sent straight to the gas chamber.
My father was beaten to death.
My sister Martha was murdered.
My brothers Willie and Martin and Louie were murdered.
And here I am, and they're all dead.
Why them and not me?
It was as if God had his hand on my shoulder to lead and guide me when I was all alone and in mortal danger.
I remember everything since I was three and a half years old.
I can tell you the color of the stripes on my mother's sweater from when I was a little boy.
It's good and bad, such a memory, because everything stays with you and you can't shut it off.
I remember where we went fishing as boys.
But I also remember what the barracks looked like in Auschwitz.
And the capo with a stick in his hand and everything he did.
And that memory is very, very bad.
It never goes away.
He reached down and rolled up the leg of his pants.
Look.