Welcome to Healing From Within with host Sheryl Glick (http://sherylglick.com) author of Life Is
No Coincidence: The Life and Afterlife Connection and The Living Spirit
Answers for Healing and Infinite Love which shares stories of spiritual
awakening and communication and ways to improve through intuition our
personal and collective life story guiding us to health happiness and
purposeful action even in the midst of terrible challenges. Sheryl is
delighted to welcome Jack Hersch author of Death March Escape a tale of
survival of body and spirit in a time of the Holocaust not that long
ago, during the second World War when insanity and terror ruled the
world and death was everywhere. Jack tells the story of his father David
Hersch remarkable man who twice escaped death by the Nazis at the end of
World War 11 due to an incredible confluence of luck fate faith and will
to survive that made him unique.
As listeners of “Healing From Within” are well aware my guests and I
seek to understand our dual nature as spiritual beings experiencing a
physical life and learning through history metaphysics science religion
and spirituality ways to understand human nature and how we may survive
many challenges or hardships through the energy and courage of the soul.
In today’s episode of “Healing From Within” Jack Hersch (https://deathmarchescape.com) shares a truly
remarkable journey of his father who not once but twice survived death
as a teenager being taken from his hometown of Dej Hungary to
Mauthhausen Concentration camp, the harshest cruelest camp in the German
Reich. After his father’s death a photograph of his father surfaced on
the Mauthhausen website and sent Jack on a journey back in time to learn
of secrets his father had never shared with him.
Jack tells us of some of the characters and places in the story and
connections that helped them perhaps survive the trauma of those awful
crazy soulless times of hatred but still there was hope and love.
David the survivor of two escape attempts on a death march towards the
end of WW11 described his youth as happy and unremarkable He played
soccer in the local park, worked in his father’s soap factory, rode his
bicycle went to school where he spent half his day on secular
subjects—Romanian Hungarian history math and science and fluently spoke
five languages: Hungarian Romanian Yiddish Hebrew and German. In the
late 1930”s his families comfortable existence grew unstable.
“Official government-sponsored anti-Semitism was encoded in Hungarian
life. Two years earlier Hungary had established a series of anti-Jewish
laws which defined, among other things, who was a Jew, how many Jews
could be employed by a single company and how many Jews could
participate in certain professions It wasn’t a duplication of the German
Nuremberg Laws restricting Jewish Life in the Third Reich, but it was a
strong echo of worse to come..Hungary’s Jews were not yet being sent to
concentration camps unlike the Jews of every other country under Nazi
influence or control. Though Hungary’s Jews like David weren’t sent in
the early years of the war to the camps they were part of the first
Labor Service battalions performing city work.” His father never went
into the very difficult experiences of those days in the camp and always
maintained a positive upbeat sense of humor as Jack was growing up,
unlike many other Holocaust survivors who were quiet and always sad.
Jack his son tells of his father’s remarrying after his mother died and
the fact that his father developed a problem with his mitral valve as
had his mother. Odd it seems I was living with my family in California
and my Dad asked us to come to a Passover Seder in New York. It was
April 7th Dad was going in for surgery and he wanted to tell the story
of the camps again. Maybe he sensed he would be passing and needed to
share more of the truth of what really happened in the events in the
camp.
