Students, parents, professors and members of the community filled the Campion College Chapel on November 10 to hear Holocaust survivor Philip Riteman share his personal account of the atrocities of war.
Riteman was only 13 years old when German soldiers invaded his hometown and rounded up its 15,000 occupants. They were moved to a ghetto and later forced to board the train to Auschwitz. Of the family members taken with him--his parents, grandparents, five brothers, two sisters, nine aunts, nine uncles and numerous cousins--Riteman would be the only survivor.
Brimming with emotion Riteman recounted the events that led up to his capture, to the day his family arrived in Auschwitz, to the years he spent in concentration camps.
The German army roused the residents of Riteman's town in the middle of the night and marched them to a ghetto. During this long trek they would pull men aside to dig large holes, then they would select prisoners and execute them. Many were still alive when they covered the mass grave so the soldiers would walk around shooting into the ground.
"I watched it. I couldn't believe what happened and still dream about it," Riteman said.
He and his family would spend nine months in the ghetto before being packed like sardines into box cars and moved to Auschwitz.
"You don't know what hunger means. You don't know what fear means," Riteman told the audience.
"I hope you never know."
His family arrived in Auschwitz after a seven day train ride without food or water. Here they would be separated by the soldiers according to who was deemed useful, and who was not.
People said make yourself older so when they asked my age I lied and said I was 18, recalled Riteman.
His parents and younger siblings were taken to the gas chamber and Riteman went off to the work camps.
"If you were 18-45 you might have a chance to survive. We didn't know it at the time, but my mother, my father, my little sister and brothers went to the gas chambers."
The tattooed prisoner number 98706, still visible on his forearm, remains a permanent reminder of the horrors he witnessed while in the concentration camps.
For over 40 years Riteman did not talk to anyone aside from his wife and children about the atrocities he witnessed and endured. Today he speaks for the millions who cannot.
"For 40 years I wouldn't talk about it: it was just too painful. No one in my family survived...but I did. I don't know why. Luck. ...Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought, You survived. You go tell the generations to come."
Riteman endured four years in the Nazi concentration camps before being liberated by the American forces in 1945.
After the war, Riteman immigrated to Newfoundland and lived there for 35 years before moving to Nova Scotia where he now resides.