More than 200 people in a LLC classroom listened in awed silence Tuesday as Eva and Leslie Aligner, two Holocaust survivors, spoke candidly about their experiences.
For 40 years, the Aligners were comfortable living in silence about all they had been through. The couple was focused on building a new life and leaving the past in the past. It wasn’t until the 1980’s when skeptics began doubting that the Holocaust happened that the Aligners stepped forward and joined a group of Holocaust survivors in Oregon.
“We feel that as long as we can talk, then it is our job to tell our story,” Leslie Aligner said as the beginning of the presentation.
Eva Aligner was born in 1937 to a middle-class family in the former Czechoslovakia. The Nazi occupation began when she was two years old. However, the real nightmare started when her father’s business license was taken away because he was a Jew. Soon after, Nazis forced Jewish men in the community to work in labor camps where he was killed.
“Even being so young, I knew what was happening,” she said.
Soon after her father was killed, Eva and her family were forced to pack up their belongings and move to “the ghetto,” where there was barbed wire, guard dogs and machine guns surrounding what was now their new home, a big apartment building where 20 to 30 people shared one room.
Less than a year later, her mother also was taken away to the work camps leaving her and her older sister by themselves. But when the train slowed down, her mother, knowing that she had to get back to her children, jumped off and ran into the woods to escape. She was caught by a German soldier, but pleaded with him for her life and he let her go. The family spent the remainder of the war in the ghetto where she said they miraculously survived until liberation.
While both Aligners survived the Holocaust, it was Eva Aligner’s husband, Leslie Aligner, who encountered the horrors of the concentration camps. He spent time in four concentration camps, including Auschwitz. While Leslie suffered through unimaginable obstacles, he says that he does not want anyone to feel sorry for him because he is the luckiest man alive.
“I survived,” he affirms.
Leslie Aligner wants to educate people about the Holocaust because it is a part of history, but more importantly, to remind the public that human rights atrocities still happen.
“Believe it or not, in some parts of the world it isn’t over yet,” he said.
In 1940, Leslie Aligner and 4,000 others were taken away in cattle cars to Auschwitz where they were separated into groups. This separation was the last time Leslie saw his mother and sister.
Over the three and a half months that Leslie was in Auschwitz, he was able to witness many things happening from his job working in the kitchen. One day, five Russian prisoners escaped. Less that two days later they were found, brought back and killed while everyone else was made to watch.
In one night, Leslie Aligner saw 4,000 people taken away to the gas chambers because the Nazis did not want to feed them. Leslie says that 65 years later, he can still hear the screams of people as they grabbed the electric fence surrounding the camp. In April 1945, the concentration camps were liberated.
“It was the most glorious day of my life,” Leslie Aligner said.
Leslie Aligner has created a new life for himself in Oregon, but he still holds the memories in his heart.
“I don’t want to forget what happened and pretend like it never happened,” he said. “I want to rebuild my life and move on, but never forget.”
One community member who came to hear the Aligners speak was Liba Stafl. Stafl heard about the event and thought that hearing two Holocaust survivors speak would help her reconcile what her own family went through.
Stafl was also born in the former Czechoslovakia where her mother was the only family member to survive a bombing in 1945. Her family lived in Czechoslovakia until 1968 when it was again invaded and communism was reestablished.
Stafl said she has experienced firsthand some of the prejudices that the Aligner’s recounted.
“What I thought the biggest thing that they said was about the ability to build a life, but not forget.”
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