Froman: "My name was no longer Erwin. I was number 74,867."

When Erwin Froman closes his eyes, he's transported back to 1944. 

He's 14 years old, standing at the edge of a cattle car door inside the gates of Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, squeezing his father's hand.

"It was the last time I saw my family, my mom," Froman, 89, said Thursday, tears in his eyes. "I can still feel the feeling holding my father's hand today. I was hit with the butt of a rifle in the shoulder and we were separated. That was the last I saw him."

Froman shared his story on Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah, on which Jewish communities worldwide commemorate the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust.

"If I don't share, then there will be no one left to tell this story. We are dying out," Froman said. "I am the only survivor in Lorain County, Ohio. There used to be 24 of us. I have a sister in Atlanta and a friend in California. These are the only people I know of left. There are 6 million people that died and I have to speak for them."

Froman captivated a group of nearly 100 students, faculty and members of the public during his speech at Penn State Behrend.


"It was eye-opening," said Alexandra Alfonso Castro, a Behrend senior majoring in biology. "It's so important for the younger generation to hear these types of things because he's lived through very hard times. It helps us remember where we were so these things don't happen again."

Sharing never gets easier for Froman.

"It still feels so real in my mind. It's still fresh," Froman said. "The sights, the feelings, the smells."

He was raised in a family of Orthodox Jews, the youngest of 10 children, in a small town in Romania. In 1942 and 1943, the heart of World War II, German soldiers were "gathering up Jewish families" and telling them they were taking them to farms to supplement demand for labor, Froman said.

All 30 members of his extended family were packed into a cattle car and transported to Auschwitz, a network of concentration and extermination camps where an estimated 1.1 million people were murdered.

"The quarters were six to a cot. I did not know anything that was happening in Auschwitz. On the third day I was there, I asked a man who had been there for two weeks, 'Where is our family? Where are my parents?'" Froman recalled. "He said to me 'What do you smell? You smell flesh. Burning flesh.' He told me the day they came, they all went to the gas chambers and then to crematoriums. 'They're all gone. Forget it.'"

He was kept at Auschwitz for a few more weeks before being transferred to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in north-central Austria, where he was forced to build tunnels. He was injured there, but he continued to work because he knew the alternative was extermination.

Conditions were brutal.

"The hills there were sandstone and it was hard work," Froman said. "We would get coffee and maybe soup in the morning, some sort of soup for lunch, and for dinner, you'd get a piece of bread."

He also lost his identity while in the camp.

"My name was no longer Erwin. My identity was a number. I was number 74,867," he said.

On May 7, 1945, American troops liberated the Mauthausen camp. Froman returned to Romania in hopes of reuniting with his family. He heard that four of his six sisters were alive and living in Germany.

After finding them, they decided to move to the United States, the "Golden Country," where Froman eventually operated a kosher butcher shop in Amherst, Ohio, between Cleveland and Sandusky.

"If there's one thing I want people to know, it's that this is the greatest country on earth," he said. "The freedoms that we have here ... I just want people to realize how lucky we are."

Sarah Grabski can be reached at 870-1776 or by email. Follow her on twitter at www.twitter.com/ETNgrabski.