A survivor’s story: How William Harvey survived the Holocaust and what he learned
“Hatred is the loss of love, and to live without love is not living at all.” – Holocaust survivor William Harvey. Photo courtesy William Harvey.
When William Harvey awoke, face down, in German barracks in late March 1945, he couldn’t believe his eyes.
“I thought I was in a five star hotel,” he recalled.
For the first time in more than a year, he was resting. No one was beating him, or yelling at him.
He was 21 years old and unable to stand under his own power; his foot was broken in three places, having been crushed by a railroad track. He was little more than skin and bones, weighing only 72 pounds. Were it not for the observant eye of a fellow prisoner, he would have been killed in an incinerator.
By the narrowest of margins, Harvey had survived the Holocaust.
70 years later, he shares his experiences with the world — and, on Feb. 1, he spoke to students at the Hollywood Riviera’s Riviera Hall Lutheran School.
Today, Harvey is 91 years old, living in a Los Angeles home not far from Cheviot Hills.
But he was born Wilhelm Herskovits in Berehove, Czechoslovakia, on May 21, 1924, the youngest of six children.
His brother died at the age of 18, due to medical malpractice, when Harvey was 3. His father, he said, returned from the First World War a sick and frail man who spent most of Harvey’s life in and out of hospitals.
He talks about his mother glowingly, calling her “the most beautiful mother in the world,” and praising her for her work ethic and talent as a dressmaker. “She was the sole supporter of the family and more of a designer — she worked very, very hard under primitive circumstances,” he said.
“I never thought about myself, but about how hard my mother had to work,” Harvey said.
The family had a nice home, but no indoor plumbing or electricity. Still, his mother would never complain, rarely even taking time to go to bed to rest.
“She fell asleep on the sewing machine; I would hear it going, and I always thought about how I could help her,” he said.
From the age of 10, Harvey took on work at nearby wineries, washing and ironing his own clothing to ease the burden on his beloved mother.
Fifteen-year-old William Harvey, born Wilhelm Herskovits, worked at an early age to easy the burden on his mother. Photo courtesy William Harvey.
He wasn’t much older when the gravity of Hitler’s rise to power began to weigh on him. A friend of the family sent her son from Berlin to stay with the Herskovits family to escape Germany. From him, they learned that the Nazis were killing Jewish people, taking their property and burning their literature.
An 80-year-old radio address given by German Chancellor Adolf Hitler still sticks in his head today. “I heard him speak, saying ‘I’m going to kill every Jew in this world,’” Harvey recalled. “‘And if I don’t succeed, I’ll make sure the ones that remain alive won’t be happy.’”
Why Hitler said that, Harvey reasoned, had no explanation — just a belief that Jews are guilty by way of birth. “I was 12, I was intelligent, and I tried to make some sense of it and why I was considered to be a second-class citizen,” Harvey recalled. “I felt just as good as anyone else, but we didn’t take it seriously.”
At the time, Harvey said, the world depended on Great Britain’s might as the world’s dominating power, and his countrymen depended on all of the good people in the world to speak up as a madman waged genocide.
“But all of the good people did stay silent, and Hitler was able to go along with his twisted ideology. We were very disappointed.”
In 1938, his country was invaded by Germany, and by 1943, the decision was made to establish a ghetto in his city.
Three weeks before his family was forced into the ghetto, his father was brutally beaten by German soldiers. He died of his injuries.
It was bitter winter, in late December, when German soldiers began knocking at the doors of Harvey’s neighbors. They began with farmers, knocking at doors and giving residents five minutes to grab whatever they could carry to take with them. Still, few knew what to bring, often forgetting to warm blankets or clothes to the ghetto, located in a brick factory. Harvey and his neighbors would do what they could, collecting what they could to donate to the displaced.
Then, one day, in the Spring of 1944, the soldiers came to his mother’s home. Harvey, his mother and two of his sisters were forced to leave (his two other sisters had already emigrated to Belgium). They stayed in the ghetto for six weeks, in terrible, freezing conditions.
“Then, one day, the trains arrived,” Harvey said.
Cattle car doors slid open, and people — young and old alike — were shoved, packed tightly into one car after the other. They traveled for “four or five days” with little food and many growing sick.
“Suddenly the train stopped. We were at Auschwitz concentration camp.”
“It looked like a twilight zone,” Harvey recalled, with chimneys stretching into the sky and smoke all over the place. He had no idea that the smoke was coming from crematoriums.
Prisoners were ordered into two lines. The elderly were told to go to the left; the young people, of able body, were sent to the right. All were stripped naked, shaved, and given a prison uniform. Those with gold teeth and fillings, Harvey said, had them pulled from their mouths.
Every morning, in front of the barracks in which he and his fellow prisoners were kept, Harvey would find stacks of human bodies, stripped naked and piled to the sky. At night, prisoners were given bowls of soup to share amongst five people, without utensils — though if they were lucky, they were given a piece of bread.
“Of all the beatings and killings that I had witnessed, nothing compared to the mental suffering when a human being was stripped of every inch of human dignity,” Harvey said.
He was in Auschwitz for 12 days before lining up to receive the serial number that would be tattooed into his arm. It was then, just before ink met skin, that he and others were pulled out of line and shipped to Buchenwald concentration camp.
“When you were taken to a new camp, you were put through a disinfecting procedure. They strip you, shave your hair, and fill a big tub full of harsh chemicals. Everyone had to…” Harvey paused at this, closing his eyes and taking in a deep breath. “Everyone had to wash in the tub, head to toe — our eyes were burning, our skin was burning, and then we were put into a cellar, sitting on a cement floor.”
There, they sat, waiting to see what their future would hold. “If they didn’t need people to work, they would put you to the gas chamber, or the crematorium,” Harvey said.
Then, a man walked into the cellar, asking if anyone knew what had happened to the Herskovits family. The man, it turned out, was Harvey’s brother-in-law, married to Harvey’s sister in Belgium. A prison foreman, Jewish with falsified Christian documents that earned him slightly more freedom than otherwise, he learned that this group came from his wife’s home, and sought information.
The two connected, meeting for the first time, and shared what little they knew of their families. They would not see each other again for nearly a year.
Six days later, Harvey was again packed into a cattle car to work at an oil refinery in Leuna. He and other prisoners would clean up the rubble made by Allied bombings. To do so, they were made to march barefoot over miles of rocky roads; cuts and infections were common.
“And if someone could not keep up, they were beaten until they died there, on the road.”
The bombings continued, and the workers paid the price.
“Many of us were killed by the shrapnel from the bombs,” Harvey said. “We preferred to die from the bombing. But we were hoping that one of us would survive and tell the world what was happening.”
That work lasted from Spring of 1944 to the Fall. By then, German officers realized that bombings had damaged the plant beyond repair and ordered the remaining laborers — those that were not beaten to death, starved, or killed in bombings — back onto cattle cars.
Harvey, and many others, wound up in the mountains. They were made to dig train tunnels, carrying railroad tracks from the train station to the tunnels. In March, months after his September arrival, Harvey’s foot was broken in three places by a fallen piece of track.
Days later, working through the pain, Harvey — who was forced to work without medical attention — and his fellow prisoners were sent back to Buchenwald.
“Left and right, people were dying from the cold and from the hunger,” Harvey recalled.
They would take the clothes from the dead to keep warmer along the journey. But it wasn’t enough. By the time they arrived at Buchenwald, Harvey was unconscious. Five days later, he woke up in an infirmary.
He was told later that when the cattle car arrived, he was frozen, considered dead, and placed with bodies that were to be incinerated.
A prisoner working in the crematorium that day saved his life, transferring him to the camp’s infirmary.
He awoke in his “five-star” lodgings. Soon after, on April 11, the camp was liberated by Allied soldiers.
Over the course of the next three months, Harvey was reunited with his brother-in-law and three of his sisters. His mother, his aunts and his cousins all died during their imprisonment.
Harvey and his sisters soon traveled to a displaced persons camp in Deggendorf, Germany, in a former Hitler’s Youth camp. Harvey stayed there, distributing food, until President Harry Truman ordered that displaced persons be granted easier passage to immigrate to the United States.
Harvey and his sister arrived in New York on August 31, 1946, where, through an aunt, he picked up a job as an errand boy at the Madam Fischer Beauty Salon. Though he didn’t speak a word of English, he spoke five other languages, and was able to pick up his sixth while working. Within a year he was cutting hair, and in three years, he made his way to Los Angeles. He left during March 1950 to visit an uncle at his Boyle Heights home during a terrible New York winter.
“I arrived here, and the sun was shining,” Harvey said. “I took the bus to go to his place, and I saw vegetation everywhere — that’s when I said to myself, I’m not going back to New York ever again.”
He began trying to find work, but soon learned that his license to practice cosmetology wasn’t transferrable to California, and to even fill out an application for the test in California, you had to prove you had a high school education from within the United States.
Newlyweds William and June Harvey. “The same night I met her, I knew I was going to marry her,” he said. The pair were wed three months later. Photo courtesy William Harvey.
After three months, he had his diploma and his license. By 1953, he had his own business in Beverly Hills. That same year, he met the love of his life: A native Californian named June Gardiner.
“She was better looking than any of the movie stars, and the same night I met her, I knew I was going to marry her,” he said.
True to his word, they were wed three months later. The couple had two daughters together, Wendy and Laurie. They also have four grandsons, who Harvey considers the greatest gifts in his life.
But June died in 1995, at age 62, from cancer; Harvey never remarried, and still wears his wedding ring in honor of his 42 years with her.
Harvey retired from cosmetology in 1980, at the age of 56. “I had to leave all of the beautiful women before they left me,” he joked. He began investing in real estate soon after, and continues to do so to this day.
He is legally blind, having lost his eyesight to macular degeneration. The center of his vision is a mystery, though his peripherals work well enough that he can make walks to the Museum of Tolerance each week, where he tells his story of surviving the Holocaust.
Sarah Ramsey-Duke met him there, on a trip to educate her son. There, she said, she was blown away following his hour-long lecture — so much so that she made the connection between Harvey and Riviera Hall Lutheran School, inviting him to speak and driving him from his home and back, duetting on show tunes the whole way.
What impressed upon her the most, she said, is his outlook on life.
“The things he described, the people he lost — and to be able to say that most people are good and that life is beautiful…some of us lose our Internet connection and freak out,” Ramsey-Duke said. “He’s everything you’d want a human being to be.”
Harvey takes pride in sharing the lessons he’s learned in life with younger generations, keeping stacks and stacks of letters he’s received from people he’s inspired in his lectures.
“I love people. You find good in every person. I’ve never had problems, and even the worst people, I could tame. I just try to accept them,” he said.
Life, he’s found, is about love. “Hatred is the loss of love, and to live without love is not living at all,” Harvey said. “The greatest thing you have to learn in life is, when you give, as soon as you give it, forget about it. Don’t hold onto it, don’t hold it against anyone, and you’ll never be disappointed.”
Nearing his 92nd birthday, Harvey looks back on his life fondly. “I have nothing to complain about — I’ve had a full life,” he said. “We weren’t designed to live this long, and now that I have, that God gave it to me…if I have to go from this earth, I may as well go with a smile on my face.”