Auschwitz laundry worker to display valuables culled from victims' clothing

Brighton resident Meyer Hack endured unspeakable horrors during World War II, where as a prisoner of the Nazi concentration camps, he lost his family and saw thousands perish.

In a place created to destroy people, Hack refused to be dehumanized and cheated death. He tied a string around his neck and pulled it before daily inspection, rushing blood to his head and hiding his yellow, jaundiced skin. Otherwise, if he appeared sick, he might have been sent to the gas chamber.

As a laundry worker at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, he found valuables that gave him hope - diamond rings, gold watches and large emeralds - that he recovered from the confiscated clothes of inmates.

On Jan. 20, he will display the small collection at a special Holocaust-Armenian Genocide exhibit at the Armenian Library and Museum of America in Watertown.

More importantly, Hack, 92, will share his incredible story of survival and the unwavering refusal to die that the jewelry represents.

"I have to talk to clean this diary. Anne Frank wrote a diary, she's dead. This diary, I could talk for a year and I would never clean it out," Hack said, seated in the dining room of his Nottinghill Road home. "There's no detergent in the world to clean this diary," he said, pointing to his chest.

Hack is thin, with his curly hair slicked back on his head. He said he remembers every step of his six years under Nazi rule, from the German invasion of his hometown of Ciechanow in Poland in 1939 to when he arrived at Auschwitz and its satellite camp, Birkenau, in 1941. He saw cold-blooded murder, smelled the gas chamber and saw babies burned. He was given a number, 73,688, which is still on his left arm today.

"I was a piece of meat. I was not human. I had no feeling. I had no sense, no enjoyment," he said. "You are like a robot. I didn't have any sympathy. I know through and through what they can do to you. I wanted to save my life."

Working in the clothing brigade, Hack was responsible for issuing new prisoners their bundle of striped prison clothes and taking the confiscated clothing. As prisoners from richer areas of Europe, like France and the Netherlands, entered the camps, they also brought with them fur coats and gold and jewelry, which Hack found in the clothing and hid in a stocking.

"Obviously, there's overwhelming sadness at the tragedy of imagining these people hiding these things, hoping maybe that ring would buy them passage out of there and instead, they perished," said Susie Davidson, a Brookline author who planned the exhibit. "Although material, they represented hopes and dreams that never materialized."

To Hack, the gold coins, bracelets and watches he found represented a return to humanity in a place bent on reducing you to nothing.

"You find some gold, you fished it out," Hack said. "So you find one, two pieces; you were desperate for more and more and more."

In January 1945, Hack and 18,000 prisoners began a death march toward concentration camps still under German control. The prisoners were split up, and Hack arrived at Dachau, near Munich, in Germany. The prisoners were immediately quarantined because of a typhus panic and lined up by their barracks for disinfection. Prisoners were required to dispose of their clothes prior to disinfection, meaning Hack would lose the stocking and possibly, after surviving so much, his life.

"They'd take the sock away and they'd kill me. No question about it. Hang me," he said.

Hack saw his friend, Avram Guttman, from Ciechanow, had a lower bunk number and knew he should already be disinfected. He began to yell out for Guttman, and when he came, Hack risked his life to sneak out of line and hand him the sock.

That night, he smuggled himself to Guttman's barrack to get back his valuables. He had a full stocking before, but much of what he had saved was now gone. His friend was an officer in the Polish army and planned to go to Israel after the war with the valuables.

Hack was liberated from Dachau in 1945, and in 1950, he and his wife, Sylvia, whom he met in the camps, arrived in Boston on a military supply ship.

Hack had his wife, his son and his will to survive.

"I came here without language, without a trade, without money, without education. Hitler took away my education when I was 12, 13 years old," he said.

Hack had family in the area, but they offered him little help. He got a job at a department store in the North End, and moved up through the ranks quickly.

"The computer was good," he said, pointing to his head.

He went to night school to learn to speak English and eventually sold jewelry in stores and found great success, opening Meyer's Bargain Center in the West End in 1954. He never touched the valuables he'd secured from the Holocaust. After Hack's story appeared in Davidson's book, "I Refused to Die," he began to talk to his friend, Dr. Dean Solomon, and told him about the valuables nearly two years ago.

"I'm not sure he thought about them for 60 years. I doubt they played much of a role in his life as he was working," Solomon said.

Now, Hack wants to share his story, which the jewelry symbolizes.

"I'm not a youngster. I've fallen a few times. I'm diabetic," he said. "Two years ago, I felt I had no more strength. I'm losing my strength."

After the discussion and exhibit on Jan. 20, Hack's collection will be exhibited at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Hack wanted the valuables to be exhibited, and felt they were never his to begin with.

"I saw how they gassed them, I saw how they opened the doors. I saw them. I said, 'This doesn't belong to me.' This is the people's goods, this is the people's watch, this is the people's diamonds, this is the people's bracelet. This is the people's other kind of things, but it doesn't belong to me. They got gassed and burned. I have enough without them. I don't want it. I don't want a part of it,' Hack said.

Davidson said she hopes some of the pieces, which are not monogrammed, might be returned to the families of the original owners. The jewelry, though, will always symbolize Hack's story and the humanity the concentration camps couldn't take away.

"These pieces, from the very beginning, meant that the Nazis had not succeeded in obliterating his humanness. The whole death camp experience was utterly and totally dehumanizing, to basically make people into worthless lumps. Their worth was how much work they would do or what their body parts would bring in. Everything was conspiring to make them worthless or nonhuman," Solomon said. "These pieces, basically, were evidence of the fact that the Nazis couldn't wipe everything out, couldn't destroy everything."

Meyer Hack will speak at the Holocaust-Armenian Genocide exhibit on Sunday, Jan. 20, from 2-4 p.m. at the Armenian Library and Museum of America, 65 Main St., Watertown, along with Armenian Genocide survivor Kevork Norian.