By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California– Lou Dunst, the renowned and beloved survivor of four Nazi death camps and two aborted gas chamber murders, remembers many things. Of his innumerable escapes from certain death, he simply asserts: “Ha-Shem [God] made another miracle.”
On one occasion, there was an unfathomable malfunction in the delivery of the Zyklon B tablets (the cyanide-based pesticide) that were to be funneled through the shower heads. Lou and the others escaped from the gas chamber, hysterical, demoralized, relieved, confused, grateful, terrorized, but still not dead.
Lou Dunst, who was 14 when the Germans arrived to his home village of Jasina, Czechoslovakia, and whose mother and father were vaporized in the camps, believes that heaven saved him, in his words, “so that I could tell the story.”
Dunst commissioned me to write his biography in 2013 and we speak nearly every Friday afternoon, just before the arrival of the Jewish Sabbath. He calls a number of people in a kind of personal spiritual telethon and conveys his hope that we all enjoy “peace, happiness, and prosperity.”
He is the soft-spoken, pious, living refutation of the “Final Solution of Jewish Question.”
The San Diego philanthropist and inspirational speaker is being honored and appreciated more than ever during the current cycle of Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations around the world. The cherubic and endearing man, approaching 90, continues to say, without fanfare: “I did nothing special and nothing heroic to survive.”
At one point during his ghastly journey through hell, Lou approached a fellow inmate who happened to be a Russian officer, older, not Jewish. The Nazis had a rabid approach to their Soviet prisoners-of-war that rivaled their sadistic treatment of Jews.
It is estimated that during World War II, some 5.7 million Russian soldiers fell into Nazi hands. Their treatment in the camps is generally regarded as being the second most horrifying, only after what the Jews received
So there was a kind of grisly affinity between some of the Jewish inmates in places like Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Ebensee and the many Russian servicemen who also found themselves in these diabolical places. It was not unusual for someone like Lou to interact, if briefly with a Soviet prisoner.
Lou Dunst traveled through his “Black Hole,” his own purgatory, via the ghetto, in the suffocating and stinking box cars time and again, and through these infernal death communities. It was at Ebensee, nineteen years old, with only his brother Irving occasionally able to put his hands on Lou’s shoulders that Lou saw a Russian officer seated alone on a stump—in a rare, brief moment of solitude and contemplation. Missing his own father, looking for some kind of insight, some wisp of reason, some paternal comfort, something other than the madness, Lou approached the soldier. “He looked educated, maybe with some wisdom he could give me,” remembers Lou.
Lou approached the man, a ranked serviceman but a “subhuman inmate” nonetheless. The tattered coat of his uniform assigned to him by The Red Army Krasnaya Armiya barely concealed his withered body and the purplish patchwork of gashes and blows and bruises that discolored his face and hands and that damaged his soul.
Lou asked him: “Tell me, what’s going on? What is this? What can it be?”
The Russian looked at him with eyes as empty as death. He said in own language:
“My head is not working and my heart is bleeding.”
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer. You may comment to ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com, or post your comment on this website, provided that the rules below are observed.
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