We are going to talk about a story than took place in the shoa. The principal character is Jacobo Gotbeter that is one of the 500,000 survivors of those times. Today he is one of the voluntaries at the Holocasut Museum in Miami Beach. He is 82 years old and this is his story…

Jacobo was born in a Hungarian family, who lived in their land crops. They were 5 sisters, 3 brothers and their parents.

It all started with the annexation of Czechoslovakia to Germany in 1938, the Gotbeters were stripped of their lands and of their citizenship by the Hungarian government. Thereafter, it was others who decided for them and they were forced to do hard labor like cutting stones and spreading gravel to build roads. Children and adults had to work for their food, which depended on how they worked.

While in Czechoslovakia, Jacobo Gotbeter and his family were forced to work, in the nazi Germany and nazy Austria. It all began in Kristallnacht or "Night of Broken Glass", a series of attacks in November 1938 that left at least 91 people dead, 30,000 thousands detained and deported in mass under the orders of Adolf Hitler.

Soon after, Jacobo and his family were deported. In the early 1944 the Hungarian military police took the Jews in their community to a ghetto in Hungary, where they remained for several months until they were taken to the cattle train that would take them to the concentration camp in Poland.

The trip lasted 14 days. His five sisters, three brothers and their parents were there. After he boarded the train he never saw his parents again. Only Jacobo and his twin brother Jaime Klein survived.

Travel conditions were unhuman, so that only half of the passengers survived the voyage.

The "hell" of Auschwitz

Jacobo Gotbeter recalls that the Auschwitz concentration camp was an inhospitable place, but what "turned it into hell were the atrocities that were committed there," he said.

The barracks where the children lived were damp, narrow and were full of mites. "That camp was made especially to kill," says Gotbeter

Jacobo saved himself because he had a twin brother. So he was not sent to the gas chamber because Dr. Josef Mengele was interested in them.

Mengele who was nazi party member, was a physician who performed experiments in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He oversaw the arrival of prisoners at the concentration camps and determined who was to be executed, who would be subjected to forced labor and who would serve for human experiments, especially children whom they called the "angels of death".

The nazi doctor did experiments to change the choldren´s eye colour, they had skin grafts and organs extracted from them, among other practices.

"Being in section D of the camp, every day I spent hours in the clinic of Dr. Mengele. I do not remember exactly what I did, all I remember is that I drew blood and I put all kinds of shots, "Jacobo said

"I remember one day I woke up with stitches in the back of the head," he said without knowing what they had done. He still has the scar.

It´s difficult for Jacobo to identify what the most traumatic moment as a prisoner of a concentration camp was… the daily ration was a soup with two or three pieces of bread… He also heard people´s screams which came from the crematorium.

In 1944, when the Russian army came to save us they moved many Jews to Melk, Austria. Jacobo and his brother were in that group.

The tour was even heavier than when they travelled in cattle trains. This time, the trip on foot. For three weeks they walked 434 miles without proper clothing in the cold weather. They only wore the uniform of a concentration camp and a blanket that barely covered them. Along the way they ate all kind of creatures to survive. According to Jacobo, human losses were massive.

“I survived, so I emigrate to the United States of America, more precisely to Miami where I made a family. So far, I have got 4 grandchildren"

In this story we see, the amazing courage that Jacobo has had in his life.