December 3, 2014

Half the people in the cattle car were already dead when the train pulled in after midnight to the station in the Polish city of Oswiecim (Auschwitz). It was February or March of 1943, and 20-year-old Joseph Alexander — known then as Idel Aleksander — stepped over the bodies as best he could, joining the lineup outside as ordered. A German officer, whom he later learned was Dr. Josef Mengele, walked down the line, dispatching each prisoner to one side or the other. Joe was sent to the left, where guards announced the group would be trucked 6 kilometers to the camp. But as he looked around, he saw only elderly and sick people. He had already spent two years in forced labor camps, learning to align himself with the biggest and strongest prisoners. He waited until Mengele moved farther away and then, taking advantage of the darkness, dashed to the other side, squeezing into the line. “The next morning I found out those other people were going straight to the ovens,” Joe recalled. 

The second youngest of six siblings, Joe was born to David and Chana Aleksander on Nov. 20, 1922, in Kowal, a small town in Central Poland. (He changed his name to Joseph when he became a U.S. citizen in 1956, taking his deceased brother’s name.) 

The family was Modern Orthodox and lived in a house across from the town square. David’s store, which carried men’s work clothes and underwear, occupied the front of the house. “We had a nice, comfortable life,” Joe recalled.

Joe attended both public and Jewish schools, each half a day. After school, he played soccer with his Jewish teammates or spent time with friends. He didn’t notice any anti-Semitism until after Kristallnacht, in November 1938.

Then, in early September 1939, German soldiers entered Kowal. “We weren’t frightened. At the time, we didn’t know what’s going to happen,” Joe said. 

But just two weeks later, the soldiers gave all the residents living around the square — most of them Jewish and owners of family businesses — 10 minutes to report to the square. They were then marched to the train station. Joe’s family and two others were somehow spared. “I’ll never know the reason till the day I die,” Joe said. 

Rumors immediately surfaced that the Germans planned to return in three days for the remaining Jews, but Joe’s father wasn’t waiting. The family loaded up two large horse-drawn wagons and left for Blonie, a small town about 15 1/2 miles west of Warsaw, where relatives lived. The family rented an apartment there. 

Two weeks later, Joe was sent to a forced labor camp in the nearby Kampinos Forest. He worked six days a week building a canal, standing in water without rubber boots, and he contracted blood poisoning. He was allowed to return home on weekends, and, after four or five weeks, he refused to go back. Local police came to the house, searching for him, but one officer, a friend of the family, protected him.  

By mid-October 1940, the Jews of Blonie were relocated to the newly created Warsaw Ghetto. Four months later, hearing that the Germans had not returned to Kowal, Joe’s father decided that Joe; his older sister, Ester Sara; and younger brother, Azik, should go back. They left in March 1941, bribing the guards to escape. “It was the last time I saw my parents, my brother Yosef and sisters Shlamis and Malka Laya,” Joe said. He never discovered their fates. 

The siblings reached Kowal safely, but three days later, all Jewish men ages 16 to 60 were ordered to report immediately to the schoolhouse. Joe joined the several hundred men taken by passenger train to Posen, a city in west-central Poland where more than 20 labor camps were constructed between 1940 and 1943. Initially, he was quarantined in Eichenwald for three weeks. 

Joe was then transferred to Steineck, where he worked building a dam, digging out dirt and shoveling it into mine carts. 

While at Steineck, Joe received a letter from Ester Sara informing him that Kowal’s Jews had been transported to the Lodz ghetto and that Azik had been taken to the death camp Chelmno, where he was placed in a van and gassed. 

Joe was then transferred to Golnau. There, he dug trenches for sewer lines and also climbed into the concrete pipes and cemented the seams. 

He was later sent to Remow, where he laid cobblestone on the streets, and then Fort Radziwill, where he performed odd jobs. At Kreising, his last camp in Posen, Joe dug sewer trenches and laid railroad tracks for a new airport. 

In all six camps, Joe was always able to procure extra food and to avoid physical beatings. “That is the one thing I always tried to stay away from,” he said. 

Once Joe arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau, he was processed and tattooed with the number 14284. In the camp, a tailor from his hometown invited him to help sew clothes for a kapo in exchange for extra food. “Somehow, I think the man upstairs was looking after me,” Joe said.

A few months later, around June 1943, Joe was transported by cattle car — along with a couple thousand men, he estimates — back to the Warsaw Ghetto.

The prisoners worked dismantling the ghetto buildings after the uprising and cleaning and stacking bricks. At one point, Joe contracted typhus and sat shivering behind a pile of bricks. Fortunately, the kapo in charge of Joe’s group was a kind man.

In early August 1944, as the Polish Home Army tried to wrest Warsaw from Nazi control, the prisoners were evacuated. They walked for three days and then were shipped by cattle car to Dachau, arriving on Aug. 6, 1944. 

Two weeks later, Joe was sent to Kaufering I, the first of Dachau’s network of newly established satellite camps. He worked in the fields digging potatoes. Shortly afterward, he was transferred to Kaufering VII, where he worked in a kitchen for German guards, overseeing a group of 10 men. He also sewed for his two German supervisors, who gave him extra food.

In late April 1945, the prisoners were returned to Dachau and dispatched on a death march. At one point, a bridge was blown up just as Joe had crossed it. “We knew American troops were right behind us,” he said. 

That night, the German guards disappeared. German police then moved the prisoners into the village of Königsdorf, where, the next day at 1 p.m., Joe saw his first American tank. “We were free,” he recalled.

Joe immediately left with a group of eight friends, and by late May they arrived at the Landsberg am Lech displaced persons camp. Joe, however, having had his fill of camps, opted to live on a farm in nearby Epfenhausen, but he still spent his days at the camp. He began buying and selling food, including flour, eggs and chickens, and later traded items on the black market. “I had it very good,” he said. 

During this time, he briefly returned to Kowal, where he discovered one cousin, Mark Alexander, who had survived. 

In May 1949, Joe immigrated to the United States, settling first in Harrisburg, Pa., and then, in January 1950, moving to Santa Monica, where Mark lived. He worked in Mark’s uncle’s military uniform store in Riverside for a short time, and from October 1950 to 1956, he ran a tailor shop at George Air Force Base in Victorville. The following year, he opened a tailor shop at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert.

In 1957, Joe returned to Los Angeles to open his own business, and while his business partner readied the space, he traveled back to Harrisburg. There, he met Adelle Edelstein, whom he married two weeks later, on July 14. Their daughter, Helen, was born in June 1959 and their son, David, in January 1962. 

Joe’s store, L.A. Uniform Exchange, was located on Melrose Avenue. He worked there selling and tailoring military uniforms until 1994, retiring at age 72. Adelle died a year later.

Joe, now 92, has one grandchild and a longtime girlfriend, Reeva Sherman.

The sole survivor of his immediate family, Joe does not know how he managed to survive. “Maybe luck,” he said, “and trying to stay out of trouble.”