There aren’t many people like Aron Krell anymore. The 96-year-old, who survived the horrors of multiple concentration camps during the Holocaust before later finding sanctuary in New York, is painfully aware of that. “There are no survivors in my area,” he tells The Daily Beast. “There were a few of them, they were friends. But they unfortunately passed away. So right now, I really don’t have any close friends at all. But I have very good neighbors.”
Ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, a major new demographic report found that there are just 245,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors still alive, globally. The study by the Claims Conference—a nonprofit which secures material compensation for Holocaust survivors—concluded that those survivors are scattered across over 90 countries spanning every continent except Antarctica.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost half (119,300 people) live in Israel. But outside of Israel, the country with the largest population of survivors is the United States, home to 38,400 survivors or around 16 percent of the world’s total remaining population (by contrast, one earlier academic estimate of the number Jewish Holocaust survivors living in the U.S. in 2010 put the figure at 127,300.)
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“The numbers in this report are interesting, but it is also important to look past the numbers to see the individuals they represent,” Greg Schneider, the Claims Conference’s executive vice president, said of the new research. “These are Jews who were born into a world that wanted to see them murdered. They endured the atrocities of the Holocaust in their youth and were forced to rebuild an entire life out of the ashes of the camps and ghettos that ended their families and communities. The data forces us to accept the reality that Holocaust survivors won’t be with us forever, indeed, we have already lost most survivors.”
According to the Claims Conference data, of those who found new lives in the U.S. and are still alive today, nearly 40 percent live in the state of New York. One of them is Krell.
Born into a Jewish family in 1927 and raised in the city of Łódź in central Poland, Krell was just 11 at the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. Even now, 85 years later, he remembers how the persecution of his community began during Nazi occupation. “First of all they started with leaflets demeaning the Jews,” Krell tells The Daily Beast. “‘The Jews are subhuman, the Jews are spies, the Jews are the cause of all the ills in the world.’”
Krell’s father had died in 1937, so it was with his mother, and his two older brothers that he was forced to move into the Łódź Ghetto—the biggest ghetto established by the Nazis outside of Warsaw, in the spring of 1940. “We didn’t have enough food to go around, so life in the ghetto became very miserable and it got very dangerous because we didn’t have any means of hygiene,” Krell says. “People naturally started to die out in the hundreds from hunger and disease.”
After four years of grueling factory work and deprivation—during which one of Krell’s brothers died from malnutrition—the Nazis liquidated the ghetto in August 1944. “We didn’t know where we were going,” Krell says. “All we had to do is get into the cattle cars.” Crammed into the fetid containers, a nightmarish journey followed which many did not survive. “They took us about five or six days—maybe longer, I don’t know—until we arrived to a place,” Krell says. “We didn’t know where it was.” It was Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The extermination camp is synonymous with the most heinous crimes of the Third Reich, including the systematic murder of an estimated 1.1 million people. “When the doors opened from the cattle cars, we heard only screams and dog barking and the SS barking,” Krell says. “And we didn’t know who was worse—the four-legged dogs or the two-legged dogs.”
“This was the worst day in my life,” Krell says of his arrival in Auschwitz. “We were right away separated. My mother was taken on one side, my brother and I were lucky to be on the other side.” He never saw his mother again. Krell and his brother, meanwhile, were taken to be tattooed together. Krell learned this meant they were going to live; only the inmates selected for slave labor would be given serial numbers. The SS did not deem it necessary to register those who were immediately sent to the gas chambers.
After a few days in the camp, Krell and his last remaining immediate family member were also separated. As with his mom, he would never see his brother again. Alone, he began an unimaginable ordeal of backbreaking work and living conditions that would see him moved around some of the most notorious sites of the Holocaust, including Sachsenhausen in Germany and Mauthausen in Austria.
Aron Krell in his U.S. Army uniform, 1952.
HandoutIn Lieberose, a forced labor subcamp of Sachsenhausen where Krell was put to work, Krell remembers the prisoners were tasked with cutting down trees. “I was given an ax that probably weighed more than I did,” he recalls. Without enough food or sleep, some prisoners died of exhaustion. “We had over there several people who said they couldn’t take it anymore,” Krell says. “They went over to the wire and right away they were shot.”
It was from Gunskirchen, a Mauthausen subcamp, that Krell was finally liberated by American soldiers on May 5, 1945. Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies just three days later. Today, Krell regards the day of his liberation as a second birthday—and celebrates the occasion as such. “My daughter thinks that the second birthday is more important than the first one,” Krell says. “Because I was actually reborn from all the things that we went through. It’s a miracle. I would say it’s nothing short of a miracle that any one of us survived. The conditions that we lived for five years were really indescribable.”
Like so many other survivors of the Holocaust, Krell spent years in displaced persons camps before Jewish organizations helped him reach the United States—he eventually arrived here in Dec. 1949. Initially working in a factory assembling colored pencils, Krell went on to spend two years in the U.S. Army and later worked for decades as a waiter. “It was a little hard in the beginning, but I made it,” Krell says. “Somehow I made it.”
Krell settled down in New York and married his wife, Lillian, in 1971. “I was a very happily married man for 52 years,” Krell says. “My wife passed away last year in June.” He says he’s felt “very lonely” since she passed away, but he remains close with their daughter, Esther, who lives just a few blocks away.
Aron Krell with his wife, Lillian.
Melanie Einzig/Claims ConferenceEven after moving on from some of the worst atrocities in history, Krell has worked to ensure that the memory of the Holocaust is not forgotten, previously spending years volunteering with the Claims Conference and sharing his personal story. “Even when you read books and you listen to people and their testimonies, there is nothing like when you had to live through it,” he says.
“When I look at it today I say: ‘My God, how did I make it? How did I make it that I’m here?’” Krell adds. “And I’m trying to make the best of it. I will never forgive and I will never forget. But you cannot live in the past for the rest of your life because if you live in the past for the rest of your life, you are a very unhappy person. I am positive. I am a great optimist and I think things will get better.”
