A Strong Warning from an Auschwitz Survivor

An Interview with Irving Roth

by Jerry Gordon and Rod Reuven Dovid Bryant (March 2020)

Jerry Gordon, Irving Roth, and Pastor Joey Rogers, CUFI Night to Honor Israel, Pace (Florida) Assembly Ministries, Feb. 2, 2020

On January 30, 2020, the 8 million-strong Christians United for Israel (CUFI), issued a press release drawing attention to a major film, Never Again? to be shown on October 13 and 14, 2020 in more than 800 movie theaters across the US. The title of the CUFI film is a sendup on the meme intertwining the history of the Nazi SS final solution that murdered Six Million European Jewish men, women and children with the recent spike in violent, lethal Antisemitic incidents in the US in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Poway, California, Jersey City, New Jersey, and Monsey, New York.

That was reflected in the comments of CUFI’s founder, Pastor John Hagee quoted in the Never Again? press release:

Violent anti-Semitism is rising across the country, and people of conscience cannot sit idly by. Anti-Semites have used the fertile ground of ignorance to grow their malicious ideology. If we are to stem the tide, we must inoculate the next generation against the world’s oldest hatred by empowering them with knowledge and reaching them with a message of unity. If we are to fulfill the promise of Never Again, we cannot allow the memory of the Holocaust to fade.

The promotional trailer for Never Again? opens with 91 year old Irving Roth, holocaust survivor of both Auschwitz and Buchenwald, silhouetted against one of the cattle cars used to transport him, his older brother Andrew, “Bondi”, and their grandparents. They were among the 4,000 Hungarian Jews in the fateful transport to the killing complex that day in 1944. His grandparents were “selected” on the platform.

Picture of Andrew “Bondi” and Irving Roth, 1930

Irving Roth, Humene, Slovakia, 1946

It was through the sponsorship of an uncle in New York that Roth, his parents and a cousin were brought to the US. Roth, whose education was denied as a Jew in fascist Slovakia, then made up for lost time. He served in the US Army, completed high school, and attended Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute earning both a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering. He eventually became a research director for an electronics firm in Long Island, New York.

Roth established the Adopt a Survivor program in 1999 in Long Island to enable survivors to tell their stories to students after going on a March of the Living to Auschwitz in Poland, and then to Israel in 1998. It has since expanded to schools nationwide.

A Long Island Newsday profile of Roth in 2019 noted the CUFI connections:

He twice accompanied Christians United for Israel to Poland as the guest eyewitness survivor, most recently in March 2019 for its “Living Eyewitness tour to Poland with Holocaust Survivor Irving Roth”.

Through the auspices of Christian United for Israel (CUFI) Mr. Roth has spoken at more than 200 college and university campuses throughout the US.

Holocaust Survivors Molly Gross and Irving Roth (University of West Florida, Pensacola CUFI Student Chapter presentation) February 3, 2020

Israel News Talk Radio – Beyond the Matrix was able to film an interview with Irving Roth. The interview was conducted at the Pace (Florida) Assembly Ministries, on a CUFI Night to Honor Israel, Sunday, February 2, 2020. We are grateful for the arrangements to film this interview by Pastor Joey Rogers and his audio-video communications team. Mr. Roth also presented at a CUFI student chapter event on the campus of the University of West Florida in neighboring Pensacola on Monday, February 3, 2020. There he met another holocaust survivor, 92-year-old Mrs. Molly Gross, whose late husband, Leon Gross, was also at Buchenwald in the same barracks as the late Elie Wiesel.

He suggests that some major American universities harbor anti-Israel Antisemitism. It is important, he says, that American students do not forget the history of the holocaust and the current rise of lethal anti-Semitism in the West.

Jerry Gordon: Mr. Roth, in your Holocaust presentations you discuss the betrayal by local Christians of you, your family, and fellow Jews living in a small city of 7,000 after the Nazi takeover and the break-up of pre-World War II Czechoslovakia. What was your experience?

Jerry Gordon: What happened to the 2,000 Jews in your hometown?

Irving Roth: Well, in 1942, early summer, six months after the Wannsee Conference, the six death camps were operational. And so, Slovakia, being a fascist country, they decided to get rid of the Jews. So, on a Friday night, 1,800 Jews out of the 2,000 were picked up, marched into the synagogue, the synagogue was then locked. They were there for a day-and-a-half, marched to the railroad station, and they disappeared, gone.

Jerry Gordon: Where did they disappear to? Do you know?

Irving Roth: Good question. Where did they really disappear to? Well, because there were different operational camps, some of them wound up in areas like Lodz, and others wound up basically in death camps: Chelmno and Auschwitz.

In Hungary about 20,000 Jews who were not Hungarian citizens were simply picked up and shipped out to a place called Kamenetz-Podolsk in the Western Ukraine. There they were murdered because it was part and parcel of the idea that the Jews needed to be eliminated. They really began that elimination in the Soviet Union. The mass murder began, in the summer of 1941 with Hungarian, Russian, and Polish Jews. At that time the Soviet Union controlled part of Poland. The murder of the Jews began very simply by machine guns in mid-1941. Thus, hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered before the Wannsee Conference.

Jerry Gordon: Probably the most notorious event was the ravine in Kiev.

Irving Roth: In Kiev, of course.

Jerry Gordon: Babi Yar.

Irving Roth: In Babi Yar. In two days, over 30,000 Jews were murdered.

And the crazy part of this, here you have innocent human beings: men, women, and children being murdered. Who were the people doing the shooting? And this was not some place 1,000 miles away pushing a button and a missile goes off. This was face-to-face. The scary part was that these were ordinary people doing the killing.

Jerry Gordon: Your family fled Nazi-occupied Slovakia for a small village in Hungary. How were your parents safeguarded? And how did your older brother and you end up being in a transport going to the killing center of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Jerry Gordon: On September 13th, 1944, where were you in Auschwitz-Birkenau when the 15th US Army Air Force accidentally bombed Auschwitz, witnessed by none other than the late Elie Wiesel, of blessed memory, and what happened?

So, there was a positive feeling.

Jerry Gordon: What happened during the Sonderkommando Revolt in October 1944?

Irving Roth: As it turns out, I worked with horses, and at different times had different tasks. One of them was plowing the fields and draining swamps. So here I was outside in the field. Suddenly, I hear this explosion and I see smoke. Obviously, something is happening. Then I see people running, and then I see people in vehicles and even motorcycles. Something obviously happened. We are taken from there back into the camp and we find out that what happened was that one of the gas chamber crematory complexes was blown up by the inmates.

Jerry Gordon: The story there was that Jewish women supplied the explosives that were apparently used by the Sonderkommandos to blow up Crematorium IV.

Irving Roth: Yes, absolutely. Because Jewish men and women both worked in three major camps: I, II, and III. Two was, of course, the death camp, where the four major crematoria and gas chambers were located. Auschwitz I was a slave labor camp where I was stationed. Auschwitz III was a factory built for IG Farben by the Nazi government, where they made synthetic rubber and oil. In order to do that, you had to have chemicals. After all, when you arrive in Auschwitz as a Jew, you get off the train, you strip naked, everything is taken away from you, except possibly shoes, and so you have nothing. However, women who worked in Auschwitz III and the people in the Sonderkommando contacted them and asked them to smuggle out some chemicals necessary to blow up the crematoria and they did. The sad story was that a week or two before Auschwitz was evacuated, these five women were executed.

Jerry Gordon: Some of that is depicted in the film, Son of Saul, which talks about the revolt and destruction of Crematorium IV.

Irving Roth: Yes.

Jerry Gordon: The other betrayal occurred in the summer of 1938 at the Évian Conference.

Jerry Gordon: Correct.

Irving Roth: It had to do with them, with us.

Jerry Gordon: At the time, the Czechs had probably one of the largest motorized armies in the world.

Jerry Gordon: Yes.

Jerry Gordon: Going back to your experience in Auschwitz, how did you survive there and the subsequent death march to Buchenwald?

Jerry Gordon: And where did you end up?

Irving Roth: I wound up in Buchenwald.

Jerry Gordon: And when were you liberated at Buchenwald?

Irving Roth: April 11th, 1945.

Jerry Gordon: And who came to liberate you?

Irving Roth: The American army.

Jerry Gordon: And who in particular?

Jerry Gordon: Interesting. Mr. Roth, we want to thank you for this interview.

Irving Roth: My pleasure.

Listen to the Israel News Talk Radio – Beyond the Matrix discussion on holocaust survivor, Irving Roth.

Watch the Israel News Talk Radio – Beyond the Matrix interview with Irving Roth.

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Jerome B Gordon is a Senior Vice President of the New English Review, author of The West Speaks, NER Press 2012, and co-author of Genocide in Sudan: Caliphate Threatens Africa and the World, JAD Publishing, 2017. Mr. Gordon is a former US Army intelligence officer who served during the Viet Nam era. He is producer and co-host of Israel News Talk Radio – Beyond the Matrix. He was the co-host and co-producer of weekly The Lisa Benson Show for National Security that aired out of KKNT960 in Phoenix Arizona from 2013 to 2016 and co-host and co-producer of the Middle East Round Table periodic series on 1330amWEBY, Northwest Florida Talk Radio, Pensacola, Florida from 2007 to 2017.

Rod Reuven Dovid Bryant is creator and host of Israel News Talk Radio-Beyond the Matrix.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast