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Jorge Klainman's Holyco$t fairytale: "The Seventh Miracle" -
Survived being shot, crawled out of pit with 99 corpses
Jorge Klainman with his book "The Seventh Miracle"
Jorge is a Polish Jew who remained silent about the horrors he
experienced during the Holocaust™ for 50 years. When he turned
68, the fog clouding his memory suddenly lifted, and he decided
he could be silent no more.
Klainman put pen to paper and penned "The Seventh Miracle", a
harrowing story of survival, which has captivated readers the
world over.
At 15, Jorge faced execution by firing squad, but somehow the
bullet missed it's target and he survived. The first miracle.
Five others would follow. The last miracle was being able to
write his tale down. Indeed.
Over the course of 4 years, Klainman spent time in six Nazi
death camps.
Once, Jorge was even pulled alive from a deep well with 99
corpses.
Concerned with the rise of anti-Semitism and Holocaust deniers,
Klainman says he tells his story because “ten years from now
there won’t be any Holocaust survivors left to transmit the
truth to young people.”
“So it’s important that everybody knows what happened. That way
they’ll be able to understand the terrible struggle of the
Israeli people against the fundamentalist Islamic savages who
want to throw us into the sea.”
A Spanish story of Holocaust
survival
By Larry Luxner
BUENOS
AIRES, Dec. 12 (JTA) — On his 68th birthday, Jorge Klainman
decided he could remain silent no more about his Holocaust
horrors.
The Polish-born, retired businessman sat at his electric
typewriter, he said, “and suddenly the curtains of my memory
began to part, revealing events that happened 50 or 60 years
ago. After that my life changed completely. I felt
liberated.”
The result was “El Septimo Milagro,” a harrowing
Spanish-language tale of life and death in a series of Nazi
concentration camps that has captivated readers from Buenos
Aires to Barcelona.
Translated into English as “The Seventh Miracle” and into
Hebrew as “Nes Ha-Shev’i,” Klainman’s first-person account
differs from most other Holocaust memoirs in its
extraordinary attention to detail. It ranges from the 1939
roundup of Jews from his Polish hometown of Kielce to
Klainman’s frightful March 1944 encounter with psychopathic
concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth, the SS officer
portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg’s movie
“Schindler’s List.”
Goeth marked Klainman, then 15, for execution by
firing squad.
“My mind refused to comprehend the reality of what was
happening,” Klainman wrote. “The end had come. They were
going to shoot me and burn me. I thought of my loved ones,
and that soon I would be joining them. I reached a state of
mind where I just wanted, with all my being, to get it over
with.”
But Klainman’s Ukrainian executioners somehow missed
their target, and later that night fellow Jewish
prisoners risked their lives to bring his bleeding body to
the camp infirmary. A kindly doctor there gradually nursed
the teenager back to health.
Fate intervened five more times before he
was liberated by American soldiers in 1945, and Klainman was
saved from certain death.
In 1947 — with the help of international Jewish
organizations — Klainman set sail from Italy to Rio de
Janeiro, caught a plane to Asuncion, Paraguay, and smuggled
himself across the heavily guarded border into Argentina,
where he eventually married and raised a family.
“Six actual miracles occurred and saved my life,”
according to Klainman, 78. “The seventh was my being able to
write the story.”
And now, with anti-Semitism again rising throughout his
adopted country, Klainman told JTA he feels compelled to
share that story with Argentines who may not have yet gotten
the message.
“Ten years from now there won’t be any Holocaust survivors
left to transmit the truth to young people,” he said in an
interview at his Buenos Aires apartment. “They’ll begin
forgetting the Jewish Holocaust just as they’ve forgotten
the Armenian Holocaust. So it’s important that
everybody knows what happened. That way they’ll be able to
understand the terrible struggle of the Israeli people
against the fundamentalist Islamic savages who want to throw
us into the sea.”
Klainman, a jewelry retailer by profession, lived in Tel
Aviv from 1971 to 1990 and again from 1999 to 2004. He is
fluent in Polish, Russian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish
and Italian, and was recently appointed official
representative of the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires.
“I’ve dedicated the rest of my life to explaining the Shoah
to students from all over the country,” he said. “Since I’ve
moved back from Israel, thousands of students have heard my
testimony.”
Klainman says he has “lots of work to do” in explaining the
reasons behind the Holocaust to fellow Argentines, many of
whom grew up with anti-Semitic attitudes encouraged by the
Roman Catholic Church and the thousands of Nazi war
criminals who were welcomed by Argentina’s military
dictatorship after World War II.
“I’ve visited many colleges and universities throughout
Argentina, giving speeches for high-school kids,” Klainman
said. “I even spoke at a Catholic seminary, and afterwards
the kids cursed the Vatican for ignoring the Jews.
“Usually when I finish speaking after an hour, for three or
four minutes they sit there in silence. Then they surround
me, hundreds of kids, hugging me, crying, asking for my
autograph. Once I took a taxi in Corrientes and the driver
recognized me. He took my hand and kissed it, and told me,
‘God bless you, may you never die.’ ”
He said the reaction of Argentina’s Christians to his book
is much stronger than the Jews because “the Jews already
know this story.”
Klainman said he was inspired to write “El Septimo Milagro”
after his son Miguel began asking him troubling questions
about his past.
“For 50 years I guarded my silence like a hermit,
but then I got tired of these delinquents denying the
Holocaust,” he said. “I realized that by keeping
silent, I was becoming an accomplice, collaborating with
them.”
It took Klainman four months to write the book. His original
draft version ran 107 pages; only 25 copies of that version
were printed.
“When I read what I had written, I realized nobody would
believe it was true,” he said. “So we [Klainman and his
wife, Teresa] decided to travel to Poland to look for
details. It was very traumatic, that first time back in
Poland, more so for Teresa than for me.”
“Jorge didn’t talk about it. I knew very little,” said
Teresa Klainman, an Argentina native who had no idea what a
concentration camp was until she met her husband. “I knew he
was a survivor, that he had no family and that he was in
camps, but it was a taboo subject. Whenever I asked, he
would tell me a few things, but he wouldn’t want to go into
details, and I didn’t want to upset him, so I learned not to
ask.”
The Klainmans would return to Poland twice more, most
recently as part of a program to bring Jewish children to
Poland to teach them firsthand about the horrors of the
Holocaust.
In October, Jorge and Teresa Klainman came to the United
States for a two-week visit that included lectures at
secondary schools, colleges and Jewish community centers
throughout New Jersey. The trip was organized by Kal
Wagenheim, the Millburn, N.J., freelance journalist and
playwright who had translated Klainman’s book from Spanish
to English.
Klainman proudly showed off a thick folder full of letters
from a seventh-grade civics class in Millburn.
“Thank you for the presentation. I found it interesting that
you seemed to keep barely missing death — especially the
time you got shot in the leg near the pit,” wrote one
student. “Maybe it was fate that allowed you to live to tell
your tale, or maybe it was just luck. Either way I am
grateful that you came all the way from Buenos Aires to
present us with your story.”
This Argentine fleabag was 68 years old before he even
remembered he was in the Holocaust. He went to see
Schindler's List and he recognized it was written about him.
Any school official that would let this clown talk to eight
year old kids should be arrested.
