Despite the graying hair and the souvenirs of wrinkles from years of smiles, Martin Weiss has a child-like look to him at 73. The rustic red T-shirt and black work-out pants definitely authenticate his down-to-earth demeanor. With legs crossed, showing off his crisp white running shoes, Weiss sits at his dining room table that comfortably fits six. Behind him, mirrors decorate the wall from top to bottom. His balding head is reflected in the mirror. But when looking at him directly, past the thick glasses, his eyes tell the story of love and hate.

Weiss has spent most of his life coming to terms with his experiences as a concentration camp survivor and Hungarian Jew during World War Two. Only recently, has he begun to share his stories with others. He was not ready to talk about the painful memories. For two years, Weiss would return often and stand on the corner across from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum never entering. Now, he visits frequently as a Survivor Volunteer in Washington, D.C. He works for the Speakers’ Bureau and for the Daniel’s Story program for children. Speaking to others brings closure for Weiss.

“Every time I went to the museum, I couldn’t bring myself to go in,” Weiss says. “Finally, one day, after trying several times, I said to my wife, ‘you know I have to cross the street.’ “

For Weiss, the museum is a teacher of tolerance. He would rather forget about the stories of suffering. But he acknowledges that you must understand the history before understanding the concept of tolerance. And that is why he always returns.

“I feel I contribute a little-I teach tolerance and fight bigotry,” Weiss says. “I feel obligated to those that died and to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”

Elizabeth Anthony, Deputy Director of Survivor Affairs, has the pleasure to work with Weiss. She was responsible for introducing Weiss to the program.

“He feels the importance in sharing his story but he is not defined by the Holocaust,” Anthony says. “He is a father, grandfather, husband and business man.”

Weiss would agree that not only is his past significant to him, but also his wife Joan, and their two children and four grandchildren. Before he was able to enjoy the life he now has in Bethesda, Maryland, he had to endure years of mental and physical pain and suffering.

Growing up in Polana, a town in the Carpathian Mountains, Weiss says he was fortunate. A democratic government ran Czechoslovakia. His father owned a farm where all nine children worked. He describes his father as domineering, old fashioned and caring.

“Although I was number seven, he treated me like I was the youngest kid in the family,” he says. “I never felt neglected. It wasn’t something someone had to tell you (I love you); you felt it.”

Weiss, number seven in his family, was closest to his older brother Moses.

“I used to be his helper,” he says thinking of him with fondness. “Whatever he did, I just wanted to follow. He was not afraid of anything. I use to emulate him.”

With a loving family, an education and living in a democratic society, Weiss says he felt free. There was no such thing as the label “Jewish”; everyone was equal. But that soon changed when the president of Poland died, he says. Weiss, his hand resting against his forehead, attempting to hold back tears, explains how his once secure world changed.

In 1938, Hitler made a move to occupy the Czech Republic, and Hungary joined Germany as allies. Hungarian army began to occupy the Carpathian Mountains in March of 1939. Weiss was nine-years-old, he says, wiping the tears away on his right cheek.

Even at nine, Weiss was aware of his surroundings. No explanation from his parents was needed. He learned by living, he says, choking on his words. As time went on, things became progressively worse as Hungarian troops raided the Jewish villages and raped their women, Weiss says.

“Whatever they wanted- no problem,” he says throwing his hands in the air. “They took away most of the livelihood for most Jewish people.”

No civil rights. Curfews. No schooling past the eighth grade. Jewish businesses disappeared. In order for his family to survive, Weiss and Moses sold cattle on the black market. Weiss says he is still puzzled to this day how he was able to smuggle meat from town to town at the age of 12.

Weiss explains how the police hired his family’s horse and wagon for their nightly patrols. And while the police searched villages, Weiss, along with Moses, bought calves. He gestured with his hands how he placed the animal in beer crates so it could not make a sound. After their patrol, the police would sit on the beer crates housing the animals and give the boys a private escort home.

“We used them and they used us,” he says with gratification. “I still remember I would shake like a leaf. We used to do things very automatic. It teaches you something about human nature–you do what you have to do.”

After many nights of fearing what was to come, on Passover in 1944, the Weiss family heard the knock at the door. His parents, along with the remaining six children, packed as much of their belongings as they could as the Nazi soldiers waited for them. Their destination was Mukachevo.

His family stayed in Mukachevo five weeks where they were ordered to stack and restack bricks day after day. He was 14 at the time, hungry and embarrassed. But in hindsight, he says, his experiences there were not terrible compared to what was to come.

“I remember the blisters from the bricks,” Weiss says as he rubs his hands together.

The horrific stories he had heard became his reality in May 1944. The capturing of Hungarian Jews came late in the war with approximately 550,000 deaths between May and July 1944.

His family together loaded into a boxcar fitting 130 other people. Three days. No water. No food. No bathrooms. No explanation. A crack in the door and a small window at the top of the car let in minimal light. He says he knew that Poland was his destination as the train moved eastward. It was night in Auschwitz when Weiss’ life changed.

“The minute they opened the box car all hell broke loose,” he says. “If you were to make a movie about hell with the devil and his helpers running around crazy and screaming with fire (this was it).”

He never thought he would return to his “real-life hell” in Auschwitz. Fifty-seven years later, he was invited to participated in an emotional ceremony on the same land where these words were heard and still ring in his head: “Arouse! Arouse! Schell! Schell!”

These were the first words Weiss heard as he jumped out of the car. Weiss was small, so to compensate for his size he put on three coats he had packed to look stronger, to stay alive. Floodlights shined upon the camp as the men, women and children were separated.

He compared the scene to the movie, Schindler’s List. A Nazi soldier, in the matter of minutes, gestured to thousands of Jews, sealing their fate.

“Right you lived, left you died,” he says as he points his thumb in both directions.

This was the last time Weiss saw his mother. And he smelled the flesh of his two younger sisters and others by dawn. He described the scene of burning bodies as if he still bore the blue and gray vertical striped uniform.

“I saw four or five tall chimneys with black smoke coming out of them,” he says. His eyes look as if he is traveling back to Poland when the spring felt more like winter. “By the next morning I realized they were burning dead bodies there. All the people that went to the left were dead.”

Weiss thought he would join in his sisters’ fate when a week later he was loaded into a boxcar along with his father. They were brought to Mauthausen, Austria where he was assigned to a sub-camp, Melk. There he was referred to as “68912.”

“We thought they were going to take us some place and shoot us because they had too many people to kill here (Auschwitz),” he says. “It was not a question of ‘will we be killed,’ but a question of ‘when will we be killed.’ This was the way our minds w
orked. Psychologically, we were beaten.”

It was a Jewish holiday when he arrived in Mauthausen. Weiss is not religious, but he says he is a moral and ethical man. He remembers men praying and his first thought was, “my God, I’m here. What the hell am I going to pray for? What the heck is prayer going to do for me now? Nothing.”

Weiss suffered in Austria for the duration of the war. Malnourished, sleep deprived and with an eye infection, he remembers only being hit once. He explains, touching his gray and thinning hair, how he fell asleep while marching and was hit on the head with a ladle.

“That was the only crime I committed,” he says nonchalantly as if it were really a crime. “When you are like this (tired and hungry), dying isn’t the worse thing to you.”

Still alive, but without his father who died in January from pneumonia, Weiss never imagined that May 4, 1945 would come. He had heard rumors that the Jews were liberated. He thought it was a trick to gather as many Jews together and kill them all at once. He waited until the next day to leave. On May 5, Weiss walked out of Gunzkirchen, Austria a free man. He was 14.

“I never remember shedding a tear the whole time I was in camp,” he says bewildered. “I never had the luxury of feeling.”

But he feels plenty emotions now, since settling in New Jersey a year after the war ended. There, he opened and closed a meat market, and joined the United States army during the Korean War. He never left Virginia while serving his country, he says with a smile of relief.

But what really makes Weiss smile from ear to ear is his family. He married Joan 45 years ago in New Jersey and they now live in Bethesda, Maryland together. She is his best friend and the one he depends on. He says that he knew that she was the one for two simple reasons: she was pretty and he was in love.

“I fell in love like head over heels,” he says. His smile made him look 28 again. “It didn’t take long. We got married very, very quickly. She makes things look nice.”

Joan, 68, was not interested in Weiss when she first met him. He had a strong accent that was a turn-off for her, she says. But she realized after a few months of dating that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him.

“He was always honest,” she says. “He is a very good husband, father and grandfather. He is very down-to-earth and a perfectionist in everything that he does.”

When he speaks of his idea of a perfect day, it is to spend it with Joan, his children Gail, 43, Jeffrey, 41, and four grandchildren. Weiss says when his son keeps him on the phone and has nothing to talk about, “that is perfection.”

“I went over to my daughter’s for supper last night and the kids were at the table,” he says. “I looked at my kids and my grandkids–that is simple, that makes me happy.”

Weiss enjoys talking about the memories he has as a young father. He is proud of his son and daughter’s accomplishments as children, parents and people.

“When my daughter was born, I forgot to ask if she was a boy or a girl because I was so excited,” he laughs. “Every night, before I went to bed, I told my wife, ‘you know if I don’t have any more pleasures out of her (Gail), just what I have had so far is fine’.”

Weiss wants only the best life for his children and wife. He says that he never mentioned stories about his past because he did not want them to “carry excess baggage.”

“I wanted them to grow up normal,” he says.

Gail does not remember talking with her father about the Holocaust until she was in the seventh grade. It was not something he hid from her, it just was not mentioned, she says. Gail can recall times that she would overhear her father and his older brother speak of the war.

“I had to work up a lot of courage to subject him to remembering such painful times,” she says. “Although he always tried to be honest, he really sought to protect me by not initiating the topic. As a result, he held inside many very painful memories with silence that has melted only in the last several years.”

The way in which Weiss has continued to live with a positive attitude makes Gail look up to him more, she says. Gail, whose husband’s parents are also Holocaust survivors, heard her father speak for the first time two years ago at the museum. She describes the aura of the room as the same each time. “The room is perfectly still. It is as if he reaches every person with the depth and detail and honesty of his story,” she says.

“To hear him finally give a forum in which his story was sought and his insights appreciated and applauded was overwhelmingly wonderful,” she says. “What he recounted was familiar (to me) yet with each retelling, the raw emotion found a way to reach every person who was listening.”

But there was a point in Weiss’ life when he believed that others did not want to hear the stories of survivors. He realized his assumption was a mistake in May when Weiss traveled back to Poland with a group of college students from Rochester, New York. Through his work at the museum, Weiss was chosen to be the guide. There they explored the impact of the Holocaust and visited the camp where he stayed.

In October, Weiss reunited with these same students on their college campus. And it was also on this trip he explains that something magical occurred.

Weiss had dinner with another Holocaust survivor In Rochester, New York. The stranger who sat next to him thanked Weiss with her tears. The last time she saw him was 60 years ago.

“We introduced ourselves and she said that she knew my town (Polana),” he says wiping his face dry. He takes off his glasses to catch his tears. His chin quivers when he tells this story. In his youth Weiss would walk to the edge of town where a woman hid Jews that escaped Poland.

“My mother use to pack-up bags of food,” he says shedding more tears. “I would walk up there (to the house at the edge of town) and drop off the food. And this women sitting next to me, she was one of those people who came back; she was in that attic (hiding).”