Three Holocaust survivors shared their experiences with more than 900 Valencia High School students on Tuesday as a part of their 10th grade Modern Civilization history course.

Each of the speakers had a very different experience in captivity, but they each shared the pain, the heartache and the horrors they witnessed with the gathered students.

The second speaker, 93-year-old Phil Raucher, was born Pinkus Raucher on Feb. 1, 1927 in Czeladz, Poland to parents Israel and Sarah. Raucher had an older sister, Rachela, born in 1924, and a younger brother, Alter, born in 1930. 

See Related: Holocaust Survivors Share Their Stories With Valencia High School Students: Part 1

His father operated a business that rented horses and wagons to local peddlers, and owned a hardware store in Radzionkow 12 miles away.

In November 1938, there came Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass,” when mobs of Nazi paramilitary forces and regular civilians torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses and killed nearly 100 Jews in and around Zaglembie, the coal mining region bordering Germany, including Czeladz. 

Raucher, 11 years old at the time, noticed a change in his friends, as many of the other non-Jewish children began echoing their parents, bullying Raucher and other Jewish children, where before there had been no antisemitism.

In August 1939, with war looming, Raucher’s parents decided to send him and his 9-year-old brother to their grandfather in Wolbrom, 40 miles east. However, the war came to Wolbrom first. Desperate to return home to their parents, the two young boys travelled back alone.

Phil (Pinkus) Raucher as a child.

Back in Czeladz, which, as part of western Poland, had been annexed to the Third Reich, Raucher started working in the new German police station, cleaning up and shining shoes for the officers.

New laws were passed, each more restrictive than the last. Jews were first required to wear white armbands with a blue Star of David, then they could not live on main streets, then they were required to work for a company that benefited Germany.  When the Czeladz ghetto was established in early 1942, the family was forced to move again, and Raucher, now 15, worked as an apprentice in a furniture factory.

In August 1942, with yet another change to work laws, Raucher’s parents hired a smuggler to take him and Alter back across the guarded border to Wolbrom, which was not yet a part of the Third Reich. The smuggler could take only one boy at a time, and Alter went first. 

Bags packed, Raucher was all ready to escape. Then, only a few scant minutes before he was set to leave, word came that the escape would not be possible.

On Sept. 5, 1942, a large roundup took place in Wolbrom, during which 600 mostly elderly Jews were murdered in the city, and the remaining people — including 12-year-old Alter and the boys’ grandfather —  were packed into trains headed to the Belzec death camp.

Two months later, Raucher was picked up and taken to a transit camp, a brief stop before the administration would deign to send him elsewhere. He was then trucked to the Markstädt labor camp, a subcamp of the Gross Rosen complex in Germany.

There, a prisoner running the cement mixer took a liking to Raucher, instructing the teenaged boy to ask to work with him. The next day, when Raucher voiced that request to the person in charge of work assignments, the man was incensed. 

“He got really mad at me and he said, ‘I have the last word here on where you go, and the last word is God — I am God. You have to do what I tell you to do.’ And he beat me up,” said Raucher. 

Surviving photos of the Raucher family.

Raucher was instead assigned to manually unload and carry lumber to a Krupp munitions factory construction site. The boards left the workers with blisters on their shoulders and constant pain. Due to his former work in a furniture factory, Raucher knew how to select the drier, lighter pieces of wood.

Once a week was “clean up day.” With no water available, the prisoners were ordered to pick the lice from their clothes, the ragged remains of what they were wearing when they first arrived.

While at Markstädt, the prisoners in Raucher’s barracks were once punished after their room leader escaped, as punishment for not reporting possible favoritism by the room leader as he handed out meals. One by one, they were strapped down to a special table, binding their arms and legs, and there, two “kapos” — prisoners chosen to be enforcers for the guards — dispensed 25 lashes from a whip across their backs.

“The lashes were made out of a cow’s tail filled with wire,” Raucher described.

As a 15-year-old, chronically underfed boy, Raucher was too small to be properly strapped down, and jumped around in pain after every lash. This infuriated the enforcers, who took their frustrations out on Raucher. 

“They kept hitting me … and they lost count. They beat me up so bad that I couldn’t walk back to my room, because I was bleeding all over,” said Raucher. “The rule was that if you had to stay more than three days being sick they would take you away. Obviously I couldn’t go out to work.”

After two days, Raucher’s father, newly arrived at Markstadt, discovered that his son was wounded and brought him food to share, helping him recover.

When Raucher’s father died unexpectedly a few months later, the administration gave him a choice as a reward for being a good worker: to have his father’s body incinerated along with the other countless prisoners, or to take a shovel and dig a grave himself outside of the camp.

Alone, Raucher carried his father’s body out of the gates of the compound, dug a grave and buried his father. Years later, he would discover that his mother had been killed at Auschwitz.

Soon after, Raucher was then transferred to Fünfteichen, another subcamp of Gross Rosen. It was there he was given a blue-and-white striped uniform, with a yellow Star of David and his prisoner number stitched onto his chest.

“Here they gave us bunk beds, four floors of bunk beds, and they gave us a little straw to sleep on, no covering or anything. They would come in each morning to check if we ‘made the bed,’ and if the straw was not level like a board, they would beat you to death,” said Raucher. “In the camps, either you died from hunger, or from beating up. There are no questions of guilty or not guilty.”

The prisoners would unload 35-foot girders with a crowbar from a railway car, and up to 40 men at a time would carry the girders to the worksite while guards whipped and shouted at them. The prisoners often lost their grip, causing the beams to fall and crush people beneath them. More would fall from the half-built roof.

Every day the prisoners would be counted in the morning, in the afternoon and in the evening. Raucher stated that the counting was not to discover if any prisoners had escaped, but instead to keep track of how many prisoners had died in their sleep or at the job site.

Raucher became ill with a cold and fever and was taken to the “hospital” within the camp. Once again, he only had three days before he would be taken away. 

It was Jan. 21, 1945, and the Russians were closing in. Stripped naked, Raucher was recovering from his cold as the SS began evacuating the concentration camp of able-bodied workers. 

“I decided, I’m not going with the people from the camp,” said Raucher. “Whatever is going to happen is going to happen. I’m not going.

Raucher had his clothes returned as he was prepared for release from the hospital. He gave them all, pants, shoes and shirt, to other patients to allow them to escape.

Knowing that officers would be searching the area for any hiding prisoners attempting to escape, Raucher decided to hide in a room where the bodies of dead prisoners were kept until they could be buried.

With the corpses of other prisoners draped over him to hide him from view, Raucher heard two SS soldiers enter the room, searching for anyone who might be hiding. 

“Now let’s go, because they’re not going anywhere,” Raucher heard one of them say.

Phil Raucher’s first driver’s license, issued April 18, 1946.

Two days later, on Jan. 23, 1945, the Russians liberated the camp. Raucher was 17 years old.

Raucher first returned home to Czeladz in March, and soon began searching for his sister in Germany. When he finally returned to Czeladz in April or May of 1945, he found Rachela and her boyfriend alive and well. 

In December 1945, 18-year-old Raucher arrived in New York as a refugee. 

He does not like to think of himself as a survivor; rather he thinks of himself as a witness, Raucher said.

When comparing modern issues with the decisions that led to the Holocaust, Raucher cautioned comparing issues of immigration with issues of genocide. He went on to explain that issues of anti-semetism have never ended, noting several recent shootings at American synagogues.

“You have to learn that there are bad people in this world, and when you see there is something bad being done, you have to speak out,” said Raucher. “You can cut it down a little, but you’re not going to stop it all; it’s a big effort. Because the people who do all those bad things are either sick people, or they are looking for some adventure.” 

One Valencia student asked Raucher what his first thought was when he woke up during his time in the camps.

“The only thing you thought was, ‘How can I drown in a barrel of soup?’ because everyone was hungry,” Raucher said.

While many of the students knew conceptually that between 1941 and 1945, 6 million Jews had been systematically murdered across Europe, it was still very different to hear the events that took place from the people who experienced it, students said.

“It think it is very interesting, because it happened a long time ago, but (Eva Trenk), she’s only in her 80s, and to think that this craziness was only happening 80 years ago is kind of odd and eye opening,” said senior Ryan Liljedahl, 17. “When (Raucher) said that he didn’t even have to leave the country to see these kinds of things happening today, it kind of makes you take a step back and make you relook at the world because you think that we’re not repeating history, but maybe we are.”

For the Valencia High teachers and staff, it was incredibly fulfilling to see their students learning and internalizing the stories that they were hearing, understanding that this was more than just a story; it was a real, visceral life experience.

“I think they really connected to it at a personal level, not just as a historical moment of a regular guest speaker but because of what is happening in the world today, and I know the social studies department has the kids discuss current issues,” said Valencia Counsellor Rhonda Carr. “I saw a lot of reactions from the kids, where you see those moments where you know as a teacher that there is a connection happening there, that they are getting it. We had students helping us and they didn’t want to leave the room because they were so interested in the guest speaker and wanted to hear the stories.”

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