Survivor Celebrates 90th Birthday in Auschwitz With 100 Descendants
by Tzemach Feller – chabad.org
Rabbi Nissen Mangel’s entire life has been a miracle.
He was a 10-year-old child when he came to Auschwitz in a clattering cattle car stuffed with humanity.
Not many 10-year-olds were sent to the right, towards life, by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. But Mangel was.
Not many 10-year-olds survived Mengele’s sadistic human experiments. But Mangel did.
And not many 10-year-olds survived five other slave labor and concentration camps and a forced death march in the dead of winter.
But Mangel not only survived, he thrived.
“My father’s motto in life is: Hodu LaHashem—‘Give thanks to G‑d,’ ” Rabbi Nochum Mangel, who directs Chabad-Lubavitch of Greater Dayton in Ohio, told Chabad.org. “And his message was the same for the future. Hitler tried the final solution and he failed, and the Nazis of today—Hamas—will fail as well.”
The trip was the product of a complaint.
Mangel’s children, who serve in leadership positions around the world, many as Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries, would get together from time to time, and had, on occasion, traveled to Europe to retrace their father’s early life.
“My father always wanted his children to go see where he grew up—Košice, Slovakia—and also Auschwitz, where he was taken,” Nochum Mangel related.
But the grandchildren felt left out. They, too, wished to participate in the family pilgrimages, to understand the horror their grandfather had endured and his gratefulness to G‑d for surviving.
So they started planning. The rabbi’s 90th birthday was approaching, and what better way to celebrate it than at Auschwitz with his entire family—his wife, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
And so they started organizing.
They’d stop off in Krakow, Poland, to visit the resting place of R. Elimelech of Lizensk, to whom Rabbi Mangel traces his ancestry, and would continue on to Auschwitz.
And on Thursday, 11 Cheshvan, surrounded by nearly 100 family members, Mangel pointed to the spot where he came off the train, where he was sent to the right, to life, and said: “Blessed be He who performed a miracle for me at this place.”
In 1944, together with his father, mother and elder sister, young Nissen Mangel had been caught by the Nazis, arrested and deported from Bratislava. He was first sent to the Sereď labor camp near Bratislava, then on to Auschwitz, where he was selected as one of the subjects of Dr. Josef Mengele’s horrific human experiments. He was sent on to Birkenau, Mauthausen, Melk and Gunskirchen, from which he was liberated in 1945 after surviving a forced death march as the Nazis fled the oncoming allied armies.
Mangel has told his story of triumph to hundreds of communities and thousands of people.
But Mangel did not just survive. He embraced the very faith that his tormentors had tried to stamp out. He became a prolific author and translator; his translated works include the Tehilat Hashem prayerbook, the High Holidays Machzor and Shaar Hayichud VeHaemuna, the second volume of Tanya.
Rabbi Mangel is the rabbi of Congregation Ksav Sofer in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, N.Y. He has lectured throughout the world. He teaches each morning and evening as he has done all his life, infusing his perspective of gratitude and faith in G‑d into everything he does.
At the family Shabbat dinner the following evening in Warsaw, grandson Mendel Mangel spoke, describing the incongruity of their visit and how crucial it was, taking place during the ongoing war in Israel.
“As we toured Auschwitz, there were many other groups visiting as well. They were asked—as everyone is—to respect the solemnity of the place, ground made sacred by the blood of millions murdered for being Jewish,” he recalled.
“And there we were, singing songs of thanks to G‑d. They were there to learn about the atrocities that took place there—and it’s so important that the world know about them—but we were there not only to remember the destruction, but to thank G‑d and to celebrate that G‑d will never abandon us, that the Jewish people will always survive, come what may.”
One of the songs the Mangel family sang as they stood in front of Auschwitz was “Vehi She’amda,” which means, “And this is what kept our fathers and what keeps us surviving. For, not only one arose and tried to destroy us, rather in every generation they try to destroy us, and G‑d saves us from their hands.”
Yes, there were moments of solemnity and tears as the family walked through the gas chambers and the barracks; when Mangel found the names of his murdered family in the thick book of victims of the camp; and when they prayed Minchah and the elder Mangel recited Kaddish for his father, who was murdered during the Holocaust. But echoing his own life, the focus was not on what was lost but on what had been built out of the ashes.
“Every Jew who survived that inferno is a miracle,” Rabbi Nochum Mangel said, quoting his father. “And that is what my father wanted to teach the next generation: He wanted to tell his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren his story so they should know that despite the hatred and persecution, Jewish life continues.”
