WESTON, Fla. — Charles “Charlie” Mendel is a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor. On Tuesday, he marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day by sharing his story from The Palace, a senior living facility in Weston.
Mendel said he was born “Karl Israel Mendel” in Nazi Germany on Oct. 14, 1935, to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, who owned a large slaughterhouse and hired maids, chauffeurs, gardeners, and cooks.
In the early stages of the concentration camps, the Nazi only took the heads of the households, so on Nov. 9, 1938, they took his father to Buchenwald, a camp that had opened in 1937 near Weimar.
“If you were wealthy enough, in those days, you had the ability to buy your way out of a concentration camp, which my father did,” Mendel said. “He was told he had 24 hours to leave Germany.”
Mendel said his father moved to Cuba. Hoping for a family reunion, Mendel said he, his sister, and his mother were among the privileged who boarded the SS St. Louis luxury cruise ship in Hamburg and left Germany on May 13, 1939.
Mendel and his mother and sister were among the more than 900 passengers who were denied entry to Havana on May 27, 1939. They were also denied entry to the U.S. on June 5, 1939, and to Canada on June 7, 1939.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, better known as JDC, negotiated with Holland, Belgium, England, and France to pay a cash guarantee for each refugee from the SS St. Louis that they received.
The SS St. Louis arrived at Antwerp, Belgium, on June 17, 1939. Mendel said he, his sister, and his mother made it to France, where his mother found work as a cook for an orphanage with hundreds of Jewish children.
The French underground resistance took Mendel and his sister to hide them from the Germans and dressed boys as girls so the Nazis would not check if they were circumcised. Mendel said he lived safely in a Catholic convent from 1940 to 1946.
The French Catholic nuns, he said, “were taking a chance with their lives because if you aided or abetted a Jew you were automatically shot on the spot.”
Meanwhile, Mendel’s father moved from Cuba to the United States in 1941 with the help of a first cousin who lived in New Jersey.
After World War II ended, Mendel said the French reunited him with his mother and sister. The reunion with his father in the U.S. wasn’t until May 8, 1946. Mendel said he only knew how to speak French and a little German.
Mendel said they had lost most of his paternal family, including his grandparents and two uncles, during the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. His oldest uncle and cousins survived in the Shanghai Ghetto.
The Nazi and their collaborators killed about 6 million Jewish men, women, and children during the Holocaust. Researchers estimate that about 2.7 million were killed with poison gas in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
Mendel grew up with his close family in Baltimore. As a U.S. Army Korean War veteran, he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, where he met the woman he wed in 1961.
Mendel remembers when he and his wife visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in 1972 in southern Poland, and a guide who grew up in the area said, “You could actually smell the flesh burning.”
Mendel, a father of two, is a grandfather of five and the great-grandfather of a baby boy. He said he dreams of future generations living in a world without prejudice.
“Here we are, you know, 2026, and we are still not there,” Mendel said. “All I hope and pray for is that some day there will be no animosity towards other people because of the color of their skin, or their religion ... You judge a man by who he is, not by anything else.”
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