The auditorium was silent, except for the echo of David Tuck’s voice as he explained to Lower Moreland High School students that he was issued three different numbers that replaced his name during his imprisonment in Nazi labor and concentration camps.
He was referred to as 176 at Posen labor camp, called 141631 at the Auschwitz camp and later called 124723 at the Mauthausen labor camp in Austria, he said.
For a little more than five years, Tuck struggled to survive enduring starvation, inhuman living conditions and hours of intense labor during the height of WWII.
“The things I went through … I don’t believe it myself how I made it,” he told students May 30.
Nearly 6 million Jews died in German internment camps during the Hitler regime in WWII; but Tuck was one of the prisoners who survived.
A native of Poland, Tuck’s life dramatically changed at the age of 10 when German troops invaded his country Sept. 1, 1939. Within weeks, Tuck and his grandparents, who raised him since he was an infant, were taken to the Lodz ghetto. His family and 125 other people were transported there by horse and buggy.
By the spring of 1941, Tuck departed the ghetto, leaving his family behind, and was taken to Posen. It was here he was issued his first number. In a matter of weeks, he was sent to another labor camp to help build a German highway system.
“Every day I had to take a cold water shower, because they were afraid of diseases,” he said. “They then gave a slice of bread and coffee in the morning, a slice of bread at night and during the day a soup. If you were lucky, you could find a potato or something in it. They then put us to work to build autobahn. I chopped stones for months.”
Tuck was on the move again, and was deported to Auschwitz and arrived Aug. 25, 1943. He worked in a sub-camp of Auschwitz called Eintrachthütte in a factory building anti-aircraft guns.
“At Auschwitz everybody from every country was there, not only Jewish people,” he said. “First, they gave me a haircut; they cut in the middle a strip just in case you wanted to run away. Then they gave me a tattoo. It was a pen with a needle in it. It made holes [in my skin] and the ink went in there. When I walked away I saw bubbles of ink on my skin. I tried to wipe it off. I figured one day I would be able to get rid of it with something. I never was.”
About a year later, Tuck was transported to Mauthausen where he worked at an underground factory to build German aircrafts.
It would be a few more months before American troops would come and liberate the camps. On May 5, 1945, Tuck said it was a happy day because American troops had arrived and he survived. He weighed 78 pounds and was well into his teenage years.
He spent months recuperating in refugee camps before he moved to Paris where he met his wife of 54 years, Marie. They married and in 1950 relocated to the United States and settled in the Bronx, N.Y. Tuck opened and operated an interior decorating store there for 30 years, he said.
Tuck said he will never forget what happened to him, but said he does not harbor hatred toward anyone from his days in the camps.
“I’m happy, I’m here and I survived the Holocaust,” he said.
Freshman Clayton Howard, who organized the special talk for his peers for a community service project through the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center in Philadelphia, said Tuck’s story really made him see the magnitude of what occurred in the concentration camps and hopes to continue to raise awareness about the Holocaust.
“We are the future,” he said.” I hope my peers see that if we are going to be good people we have to learn that bad stuff happened and work to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
Follow Jarreau Freeman on Twitter @JarreauFreeman.