Eugene Zinn was about an hour into a PBS Holocaust documentary in January when he heard a familiar voice speaking his native Slovak tongue.
Eighty years old with his eyesight nearly gone, Zinn pressed his face closer to the television screen in his West Hills den.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday May 06, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 News Desk 2 inches; 73 words Type of Material: Correction
Holocaust survivor -- An article in Wednesday's Section A about Auschwitz survivor Eugene Zinn misspelled the name of the concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland, where most of Zinn's family members were murdered. It is Majdanek, not Madjanek. (An alternate spelling of the camp is Maidanek.) In addition, the article described Zinn as having returned to Palestine after the war. Palestine had become the state of Israel shortly before Zinn arrived.
There, clad in an argyle sweater and walking around the restored Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, was Otto Pressburger, a man for whom Zinn had been searching for much of his life.
Zinn knew he needed to find Pressburger. He knew he wouldn't rest until he did.
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For decades, Zinn didn't speak about the horror of the Holocaust. His three years in the death camp seemed so distant. So at odds with a happy and fruitful half-century in Los Angeles. The 45-year marriage. The fulfilling career designing wheelchairs. The two "extraordinarily wonderful" children he had raised, sent to college and on to successful careers. The perennial kvetching about the Dodgers.
The nightmares, however, never let up. He would conjure up images of his mother, Helen, then 46, and his father, Heinrich, 58, lined up outside the gas chamber with his little sisters Maedy, 13, and Erika, 12. Screaming for help once inside. Finally passing out. No one to help them.
"There's no way you can block it out," Zinn says.
Zinn knew of no one in L.A. who could relate. Even he couldn't quite fathom the enormity of it. "Sometimes I'd think, did it really happen to me?" If people inquired about the striking blue "30113" tattooed across three inches of his outer left forearm, he would reply, "I was at Auschwitz." Few pressed further.
Zinn says he didn't want to trouble his children with the evils he had endured. Instead, he did his best to try to enjoy life. He took his kids to baseball games. He sent flowers to his wife, Sarah, each Valentine's Day. He flew the family to Europe or the Caribbean on annual vacations. "And thank God, we had beautiful times," Zinn says. "I wanted to raise my children to be happy."
Son Harry, now 44, recalls reading "Night," Elie Wiesel's famous Holocaust account, in junior high school and realizing for the first time what his father must have endured.
But it would be like asking someone whether he had cancer, the younger Zinn recalls. "You don't want to know it's true, and if it is, you don't want to bring it up."
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