Holocaust survivor, 94, returns to the Auschwitz cell block where he spent years of his childhood
David Schaecter was 11 when the Nazis locked him in Cell Block 8 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. They starved and tortured him there for nearly three years. On Monday, about eight decades years after his imprisonment, the now 94-year-old returned to Block 8.
He is the first Holocaust survivor, and first member of the public since World War II, to enter the space, which is in a closed part of Poland’s government-funded Auschwitz Museum.
“I was sick to my heart, I was trembling, I was remembering,” Schaecter, told the Forward in a phone interview from Jerusalem on Wednesday, two days after his visit to Auschwitz. “For me to be back there in this gehinnom [Hebrew for purgatory] was not an easy thing,” and he recalled the many times he had been beaten there.
Schaecter, who has returned to Auschwitz about 20 times as part of the March of the Living, said he had been turned away each time he sought entrance to the cell block in the past.
David Schaecter outside Cell Block 8 at Auschwitz-Birkenau on Monday April 24, 2023. Courtesy of Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces
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