The room was filled with students and adults, young and old, who came to hear the story of one of the last survivors of per- haps the world’s most disgusting atrocity, the Holocaust. It’s an event that saw 6 million Jews massacred, yet today’s youth is unaware of the magnitude of it, as study after study shows.

Joseph “Joe” Alexander, a Holocaust survivor, told his story in which he witnessed the worst in humanity and was forced to go through 12 concentration camps. Alexander was separated from everyone he ever knew and was the only survivor from his immediate family.

In the winter of 1943, Alexander arrived to Auschwitz, a well-known concentration camp for being a place to go die during the Holocaust. Immediately he was put to the test. He made a decision that directly saved his life. Having just gotten out of the train car, Alexander and the remaining prisoners who managed to stay alive on the ride over from the previous concentration camp to Auschwitz were directed to form two lines.

German officer and doctor Josef Mengele, also known as the “angel of death,” directed the prisoners into two separate lines. The men formed lines to the left and right. Those in the left, were soon “shipped off” to the crematorium or the gas chamber. Alexander was in that line, placed with the elderly, the very young, and the sick. He noted that in
the other line, the men looked healthier and more able-bodied. They were later sent to working camps. As Mengele moved away from that line, Joe bolted to the other line, saving himself from being cremated. Had it not been night, he probably wouldn’t have gotten away with it, he said.

While Joe was a prisoner, he was put into hard labor camps being forced to build sewers, dams, airports, and even lay- ing railroad tracks while being threatened with death and being subjected to conditions marked by illness and starvation. He suffered from skin diseases and blood poisoning, and later on contracted typhus.

In 1945, Alexander and the remaining survivors were liberated by U.S. troops. It was shortly after that he learned his cousin, Mark Alexander, also survived. When he immigrated to the U.S., he worked in several tailor shops before settling in Los Angeles and opening his own shop. While in Los Angeles, Alexander married and had two children.

He lived.

Since then, Alexander has been a leading voice in Holocaust education, speaking to colleges and high schools in the Los Angeles community.

Alexander also discussed the sheer insanity of those who deny that the Holocaust ever took place.

As one person in the audience pointed out, one cannot help but compare the magnitude of the Holocaust to the atrocities committed against the Armenians in 1915, where the Ottoman Turks exterminated 1.5 million men, women and children. Though many survivors of the Armenian Genocide spoke out, and educational documents, studies and evidence has been published, the Turkish government remains adamant about denying that such a thing ever happened.

Every year, Armenians around the world, gather to march in hopes to get recognition from the American Government as well as the Turkish authorities. Every year, it seems that their efforts are tested over and over again.

For those of the Jewish community, it appears that they gather to honor the lives that were lost during this horrific time in history, and yet gross anti-semitism against them rears it ugly head time and time again, from Pittsburgh to San Diego, from Toulouse to Tel Aviv.

Joseph Alexander is a living proof of one of the most tragic pages of the world’s history. Unfortunately, he’s one of the last, too.