Zoltan Matyash witnessed “the worst of human agony” at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Now he and his wife, Mera, are trying to get by on a fixed income in Borough Park, Brooklyn.
By Masha Goncharova
Zoltan Matyash in the subsidized apartment in Borough Park, Brooklyn, that he shares with Mera, his wife of 61 years.Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times
Zoltan Matyash grew up in Czechoslovakia, the oldest of two boys and four girls. He was born a Kohen, part of a line of priests who in the Jewish tradition are responsible for transmitting God’s blessing.
“I was raised to be very proud of my family, our traditions and our religion,” said Mr. Matyash, who turns 89 on Friday, speaking in Russian in the apartment in Borough Park, Brooklyn, that he shares with Mera, his wife of 61 years.
Mr. Matyash had just turned 13 when his father, Yakob, taught him to conduct the Kohanim blessing. It was 1944, the year the Nazis occupied their town, Mukachevo, which had a large Jewish population and is now in western Ukraine. They forced the Matyash family — 20 people, including Mr. Matyash’s grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins — into a ghetto.
In the year that followed, Mr. Matyash, barely a teenager, would lose 18 of those relatives and experience the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, beginning with Auschwitz.
Mr. Matyash said that he and his family were greeted at Auschwitz by Josef Mengele, the infamous doctor who surveyed prisoners as they arrived to determine whether they were fit for work or were to be executed. He told Mr. Matyash’s mother and sisters to “go left,” referring to the line for the crematory.
Mr. Matyash’s Auschwitz prisoner number, A-6307, was tattooed on his left arm when he arrived at the concentration camp in 1944. He was 13.Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times
“My father and I did not even see them leave,” Mr. Matyash said. “We were next in line, so we did not even realize they were gone. We just thought they were going to a different part of the camp.”
Dr. Mengele asked Mr. Matyash’s age. He was 13, but Yakob said he was 18, which would make him fit for labor.
“Of course, I did not look 18, so they needed to verify if I could withstand pain,” Mr. Matyash said. “They hit me several times with an iron whip with long wires and cords coming off of it. I can still feel the lashes sometimes. I was tall but very thin, you see. But I withstood the pain. That whip saved my life.”
In short order, Mr. Matyash and his father were stripped naked, shaved, disinfected and given uniforms. Then their identification numbers were tattooed on their left arms: A-6307 for Mr. Matyash, A-6308 for his father.
Not far from the barracks where they received their tattoos, Mr. Matyash said, thick smoke billowed from pits filled with burning bodies. Yakob asked a guard where his wife and daughters were.
The guard pointed to the smoke. “He said, ‘There,’” Mr. Matyash recalled.
Mr. Matyash soon learned he would be transferred to a subcamp while his father would remain in Auschwitz. “My father was crying,” Mr. Matyash said. “He said, ‘I have lost five of my children. And now I lose my sixth.’”
Once he arrived at the Janinagrube subcamp, Mr. Matyash spent his days hoisting 11-pound sacks of cement on his shoulders and handling coal without gloves. After a brief transfer to Jaworzno, another Auschwitz subcamp, Mr. Matyash was forced on a nearly two-month death march through Poland and Germany in the dead of winter to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
“This is where I saw the worst of human agony,” Mr. Matyash said. “I came to recognize the look in people before death. They would lie on the ground with their pale eyes already growing dim and take balls of snow and put it in their mouths, just to feel as if they had something to eat before they died.”
Mr. Matyash remained at Buchenwald until American troops liberated it on April 11, 1945.
“Oh, they had on beautiful uniforms. And nice cars, and different guns than the Nazis had,” Mr. Matyash recalled. “I knew they were not Nazis, but I was still afraid. I was afraid of everything.”
From Buchenwald, Mr. Matyash went to Budapest. He had plans to go on to America, but a fateful encounter changed his plans.
“I was walking down the street and heard, ‘Hey! Matyash, Zoltan? Is that you?’” Mr. Matyash said. It was a friend of his father’s. “He told me that my father was alive and back home. I ran to the train station and went straight home.”
When he got to Mukachevo, Yakob was waiting at the end of their street.
“We were hugging and crying in the street,” Mr. Matyash said. “Can you imagine what joy this was? We both survived and found each other!”
The Matyashes recently received $566 from The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund to pay their rent for November and December.Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times
Mr. Matyash found work as a furniture upholsterer. He and Mera, a midwife, married in 1957, and by 1960 had two boys. Yakob remarried and moved to Israel. His new daughter-in-law had a father-in-law who was the superintendent of an apartment building in New York. This was the building where the Matyashes would settle a year after they moved to the United States in 1990, and where they live today.
Many in Borough Park’s Jewish community have come to value Mr. Matyash for the Kohanim blessing he delivers, as it is especially meaningful coming from a Holocaust survivor.
“If he is not wearing long sleeves, and his number is visible, all sorts of people — a woman, a whole family, a rabbi — they will come up to him and ask him to bless them,” said Mrs. Matyash, 80.
Illness has prevented the Matyashes from working since they immigrated. He has arthritis and a pacemaker; she has high blood pressure and severe asthma.
The couple rely on $1,157 in Supplemental Security Income and $184 in food stamps each month. Mr. Matyash receives $180 a month in German Social Security payments for Holocaust survivors who worked in Nazi ghettos, and $1,200 every three months through the Article 2 Fund, established by the German government to compensate Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.
Mr. and Mrs. Matyash met at a train station in Mukachevo, a city in Ukraine that was once part of Czechoslovakia. Mr. Matyash said he is eager to share his story so young people understand “the reality of what happened.”Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times
With their modest income and health concerns, Mr. and Mrs. Matyash struggle to pay the $283 monthly rent on their subsidized apartment.
In 2014, at an event at the local library, Mr. Matyash discovered the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, a beneficiary agency of UJA-Federation of New York, one of the seven organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. Mr. and Mrs. Matyash have since been attending the Met Council’s events for Holocaust survivors and using its kosher food delivery service.
In October, the Met Council used $566 from The Fund to cover the Matyashes’ rent for November and December.
Mr. Matyash said he was eager to share his story with young people so they would know “the reality of what happened.” The memories haunt him almost every night.
“Just ask my wife, who has to deal with this when I have nightmares,” he said. “I have nightmares that they’re beating me, that dogs are barking, that they have a dog on a leash specifically trained to bite me. I can’t seem to get rid of this.”
