Box for Life (2017) - full transcript

Occasionally, not often,

heaven or destiny

or both

grant an ordinary person

a life far from ordinary.

I've found myself

in uncommon places and situations

and taken part in historic events.

I've never been

a statesman or a politician,

an author or a star

or a champion.

This will be the life story

of an ordinary man

who saw much, heard much

and experienced much.

I was lucky.

Very lucky.

It's destiny.

We're all subject to destiny.

True, sometimes you can

try to help destiny along,

fix a little, push a little,

but it's up to destiny, not you.

How did I make it through?

I don't know.

Hello.

-How are you?

Very well.

-I'm happy to see you.

Likewise.

You look in good shape.

This is your home,

that's your picture.

I know, it's true. -Noah, along with

all the sports legends.

I always say that L'Equipe

is like my apartment.

How long have you been

writing for the newspaper?

62 years.

62 years!

Since 1953.

Noah means a lot to us.

He's always like a fresh breeze

coming from Tel Aviv.

Here are the pictures

from your visit.

I come here once or twice a year.

They're always happy to see me

because to them I'm...

a novelty.

How can someone work

for the same newspaper

for 60-something years?

It's impossible.

I started getting interested in boxing

when I came back from the camps

since I met Young Perez

and I boxed... "Boxed,"

I boxed for my life,

it's true,

but I was never a great boxer.

Was Perez Tunisian?

-Yes.

He was a champion, very famous.

Perez?

-Yes. -Very famous.

And nobody knows

what happened to him? -No.

No? -No.

Nobody cared, either.

After all,

he was a French world champion.

One day I was in the editorial room

with the basketball writers

when I heard the boxing writers

from the other room.

They wanted to do a retrospective

on world champion French boxers

and one said: But we don't have anything

on Perez. What happened to him?

We know he was deported by the Nazis

but no one knows what happened then.

I went over to them and said:

I'll tell you what happened to him...

They asked me to write about him

for the paper and I did.

That's when I told the story

of the boxers for the first time

which nobody knew,

nobody knew the story of

the boxing team in Auschwitz.

As someone who survived Auschwitz

it was not because I was stronger,

not because I was smarter,

I survived mainly

because I was lucky.

More miracles happened to me

than to others, that's all.

Miracle after miracle.

Otherwise I wouldn't have survived.

On January 15th, 1943

the Germans sent me to Auschwitz.

I was 16 years old,

alone, parentless.

We traveled for 3 days and 3 nights

in outdated freight cars.

The crowding was horrific.

The bitter cold and deafening roar

of the train wheels

dulled our senses

and made us numb

to our surroundings.

If I'd known what awaited me

I'm sure I would've tried to escape.

Eventually the train

started to slow down.

I glanced outside and saw

we were approaching some kind of prison.

I saw prisoners in striped uniforms

doing various jobs.

I had no idea that it was

a camp for Jews.

They took us out with kicks and blows,

with rifles and dogs.

They stood us on a ramp,

on a platform.

They separated the women from the men

and the women disappeared somewhere,

this was at 5 a.m.,

it was dark out.

Freezing.

And we stood there.

I'd like you to meet Noah Klieger...

He is the real story of triumph.

18 months ago

I lost the use of my joints here.

I can hardly walk,

that's why they're driving me.

When we came through the gate

and I saw your group

with two Israeli flags,

I said...

How many times have I seen this?

Thousands of times.

I've seen thousands of groups

walking with flags.

And every time

I see people carrying

an Israeli flag

it's like the first time

and it makes me want to cry.

They took us into the camp

and stripped us.

The women vanished

and about 650 of the men remained

and they put us in a hangar.

When they shut the hangar gates

we realized the hangar

had no roof.

So we were standing outside,

naked.

And we stood there for 22 hours.

And over those 22 hours

we lost two thirds of the men

who'd come in,

they froze to death.

The next morning

two SS officers came in

and one shouted:

Any boxers among you?

To this day I don't know

why I raised my hand,

I wasn't a boxer, of course.

Boxing was definitely the biggest

miracle that ever happened to me.

Naturally, I knew nothing

about boxing,

I was only 16.

Still, I was an aggressive kid

and very strong,

I had no choice. As a short

Jewish boy among gentiles

I got in a lot of fights

and became an expert street fighter.

I was born on July 31, 1926

in Strasbourg, France.

My father was an author

and a journalist,

a great intellectual with a PhD.

My mother was a housewife

who loved music, dance and theater.

My parents were very different

from most people I knew.

I don't think my mother knew

that she was one of the first

feminists in the world.

My mother insisted

that women didn't exist

just to cook

and raise children.

When I was seven

my father sent my older brother Jonathan

to study at a yeshiva in England.

I was too young

and I moved with my parents

to Belgium.

"Nazi Army Invades Belgium"

In 1940

I was 14 years old.

Our whole lives changed

when the Germans invaded Belgium.

Like many other

Jews and Belgians

we tried to flee from the German army

into France.

We were sure the French army

would stop them.

We were wrong...

We ended up in the French

port city of Dunkirk.

Tens of thousands of refugees

lying on the beach at Dunkirk,

it was like a movie.

1940,

the German army outflanks

the British Expeditionary Force

and the besieged French army

in the beach town of Dunkirk.

The allied soldiers

trapped on the beach

manage, through a heroic effort,

to rescue some 200,000 soldiers

and take them across the English Channel,

all before the eyes of hundreds

of thousands of Belgian refugees

lying on the shore and

looking on in horror.

I went up to a red-haired

British corporal

and said: I want to go with you.

He looked at me

and stroked my hair,

he was tall,

and he said:

You're too young to fight.

We can't take you,

but don't worry,

it's going to be a long war

and you'll get to fight the Germans.

Of course he didn't know

where I'd end up.

And the British didn't take civilians.

Why should they take

my father or my mother

or the women and babies

who were with us?

I went back to my parents

and we lay on the beach

in Dunkirk for four days.

We went back to Belgium,

to Brussels.

By then there were anti-Semitic laws

and yellow patches.

I wasn't going to school anymore

and like all Jews we started

looking for hiding places.

Trying to survive.

Is it that way?

It's behind the church

as I recall.

It's the same door.

They haven't changed the door.

This is one of the apartments

we lived in.

By then they were

used for hiding.

I think I lived here in '41, '42,

so that was 73 years ago.

Not bad...

For months we felt safe

until we got the feeling

that someone was onto us,

then we moved on.

If we hadn't attracted attention

we would've lived out the war here.

It didn't go badly.

I was sure we'd make it

through the war

without incident.

I was wrong...

I'm sorry my parents aren't here

to see this.

In Brussels we started

a Jewish underground group

disguised as a scout troop.

We smuggled Jewish children

from Belgium into Switzerland.

I was a blond, blue-eyed boy,

I spoke both French and Flemish,

so I was put in charge of

taking the children from Brussels

to French smugglers

waiting in Mouscron,

a border town between

Belgium and France.

We looked for children and teenagers

and persuaded their parents

to let them go with us.

I did that for many months.

Twice a week I'd take

three or four kids to Mouscron

by train.

There we'd sit in a cafe,

a different cafe every time

so as not to attract attention,

and wait for the smuggler

to come pick up the kids.

True, I was only 15,

but I wasn't a child anymore.

I really had no childhood.

I went from being a child

to an adult in two or three years

and looking back

I've always regretted

not having a childhood like almost

every other child in the world.

But what could I do?

I was born at the wrong time.

These are beer-drinking towns.

If you drink coffee here

people look at you askance,

"What's he doing, drinking coffee?"

I don't like beer

but I drank it anyway

and waited for the smuggler.

We took 260 or 270 kids across

until no one else wanted to go.

Then we decided to move

to Switzerland as well.

There were seven of us

in the underground group.

We split into two groups

and drew straws.

I was to cross the border

with the first group.

But then, little Maurice,

the group commander,

asked me to switch with him

so he could go with his girlfriend

who was with me in the first group.

I said "no problem"

and we switched.

They crossed

and the three of us sat

and waited for the smuggler.

And the smuggler didn't show up.

Three Gestapo agents came

and checked our papers

and our papers checked out

completely.

And as they were about to leave

one of them said:

But they must be here.

I realized

they were onto us,

someone ratted us out.

He said to me:

Come to the bathroom with me.

I asked him:

What for? What's the matter?

He said:

I want to see if you're a Jew.

Then I knew it was all over.

There was no way out.

You look back on

when you were 16,

a boy who wanted to live,

and here you are,

an old man.

An old man at the end of his days

and you see these places,

naturally it hurts.

It has to hurt.

It hasn't changed at all.

We got off the train here.

Except that the train

is more modern,

nothing here has changed.

And...

when I was here

after I was arrested

I'd never have believed

that I'd ever come back to Mouscron.

When I was caught in Mouscron

my parents were in

the hideout in Brussels.

I lost all contact with them

and I didn't know what became of them.

So instead of Switzerland

I ended up in Auschwitz.

At dawn they took those of us

who raised our hands

when they asked who was a boxer

to a nearby camp.

There they put us in a block

that looked just like a gym.

You could forget for a moment

that you were in the heart of a death camp.

A boxing ring...

sandbags,

punching bags.

27 or 28 men working out.

The commandant of Auschwitz III,

Heinrich Schwarz,

is an avid boxing fan.

To amuse himself and his officers

he picks out Jewish boxers

from each transport

and starts a boxing team

in the camp.

Every Sunday

boxing matches are held before all the

prisoners for the Nazis' entertainment.

We were greeted,

if I can use the term,

by a prisoner who said:

My name is Kurt Magatanz.

I'm in charge of the boxers.

You say you're boxers?

Show me what you can do

and woe to you if you lied.

You'll go straight to the gas chamber.

A boxer or boxing expert

can tell from a few moves

if the other is a boxer or not.

A boxer always has

both feet on the ground

and his arms are either

like this or this.

There were two professional boxers

among us

and Sally did a few moves...

To him it was absurd,

and Sam did a few moves.

At that moment I thought:

They're going to send me

to the gas chambers,

I know nothing about boxing.

But luckily another miracle happened,

Kurt Magatanz was a total idiot

because when the two boxers

did their moves

he said: "I gather you're all boxers.

"All right, get dressed

and start working out."

In the corner of the gym

was a short boxer

working on...

punching

rapid-fire, like a machine gun.

I'd never seen such speed.

And when Kurt saw me watching him

he said: Oh, you're watching him?

He's a world champion.

Victor "Young" Perez,

a Tunisian Jew,

earned the nickname "Young"

when in 1931 he became

the youngest world champion

boxer in history

before his 21st birthday.

I went over and spoke to him.

Like any self-respecting Frenchman

he only spoke French

and we spoke.

And as we were talking

a slightly taller boxer joined us

and introduced himself: "I'm Jacko Razon."

He was from Salonika.

"I'm the Greek and Balkan

lightweight champion."

And he looked at me and said,

"Are you even a boxer?"

I said, "Of course not."

He said, "That's very bad news.

"The first time you fight

"they'll realize you're no boxer and they'll

send you straight to the gas chambers.

"Let's do something else,

"I'll join you in the ring

for your first fight

"and we'll stage the fight.

"They'll see that you're no great boxer

"but you'll pass the test.

"You'll make the team."

And that's just what we did.

Jacko saved me

from certain death

and Jacko also helped

match me up against

men who were either lighter than me

or not such great boxers

so I'd get through

the other fights, too.

I had 22 or 23 fights

and I didn't win a single one.

Which makes sense,

they were all much better than me,

but by then I had some idea

about how to box.

No one cared about

winning or losing,

the idea was to amuse

Commandant Heinrich Schwarz and his men.

It was a real show.

Young Perez was a great man.

He worked in the camp kitchen because

he was the commandant's favorite.

After all, he was

a world champion.

He worked in the kitchen

and every evening at around 6:00,

after roll call,

he came out with a 50-liter pot

of soup, horrible soup,

quickly gave everyone

a liter of soup and went back.

He saved hundreds of lives.

And when we told him: Young,

if they catch you

they'll hang you,

this is sabotage,

he said, "No problem.

"Man isn't born to help himself,

"man is born to help others.

"Family, friends,

that's what man is born for,"

and he did it, too.

A liter of soup,

decent,

nutritious soup,

made the difference between

life and death in a camp like Auschwitz.

So when I got too sick to go on

I became one of the comrades

who got extra soup

from Young Perez.

He saved me, too,

for a few months.

Being on the boxing team

didn't exempt me from work.

I had to do various kinds of

forced labor every day of the week

besides training day.

The Kapos didn't favor us, in fact

they gave us extra burdens

to prove we weren't

getting special treatment.

I eventually broke down.

I contracted a severe lung disease,

I lost 24 kg in three weeks

and was on the verge of death,

a walking skeleton.

Luckily, my block commandant

liked me

and sent me to the camp infirmary.

The infirmary was run

by a prisoner,

Jewish doctor Prof. Robert Weitz

from Strasbourg, my hometown.

I was hospitalized for three weeks.

One day I heard shouts:

Seleccion! Seleccion!

Selection.

I knew I was in big trouble.

In came Mengele,

one of his doctors,

if you can call that a doctor,

and Robert Weitz,

the infirmary director.

Mengele went like this...

left or right.

He didn't even say "left" or "right,"

why waste his breath?

And I show up

and of course he goes like this,

left, straight to the gas chambers.

I start walking

and I say to myself:

Noah, you're a dead man.

You have nothing to lose.

I turned around

and stood at attention

in front of Mengele.

I have to say,

sometimes I think about the situation,

it had to be the most

grotesque situation imaginable.

A naked skeleton standing

at attention in front of someone.

I stand at attention

and say at a dizzying pace:

I'm still young, I can still work.

He looks at me

and doesn't say a word

and I say: I come from Strasbourg

and my father is a very famous

journalist and author.

What does Mengele care about

my father... a famous author?

But I didn't know what to say.

Then he turns to Robert Weitz

and says: Do you know his father?

He says "of course."

Weitz had no idea

who my father was.

Then Mengele says: Weitz...

Weitz, do you want him?

Weitz says to him:

"If...

"Herr Commandant wants to give him

to me, I'd be glad to take him."

He says: Fine, take him.

I had...

if there is such a thing,

which of course there isn't,

a guardian angel,

then he guarded me well.

He showered me with miracles.

In '63 there was a doctors' convention,

by then Weitz was one of

France's greatest specialists,

and they had a special press conference

with him at Sokolov House in Tel Aviv

and I sat in the front row

and three or four sentences in

he said to the audience:

"Just a second. Excuse me,

"I have to find something out."

Then he looked at me

and said:

"Aren't you the young man

from the camp

"whom Mengele gave me?"

He recognized me,

even though then I weighed

maybe 42 kg

and now I weighed twice as much.

He recognized me

and I said yes.

And we hugged and kissed.

He really was a great man.

I'm not the only person he saved,

he saved many people.

On June 6th, 1944

the allied forces invade the beach

at Normandy, France

and start to advance toward Germany.

In January of 1945

the Germans evacuate

the Auschwitz death camp,

blow up the gas chambers

and take the 60,000

surviving prisoners with them

on a death march into Germany.

I,

like everyone else in Auschwitz,

was sure I wouldn't survive.

There were also many

who gave up hope

and grabbed the electric fence.

Two seconds later...

they were black.

Totally burnt.

That was easy.

I put off going to the fence

from day to day.

I figured I could always

go to the fence.

I'll wait another day.

On January 22nd, 1945

they marched us out of the camp.

All of us French-speakers

walked together,

Young Perez, Alfred Nakache

and many others,

so we could help each other.

We're a few km from Auschwitz.

I don't remember

this specific place

but I went through many places like it.

You can't imagine what it was like.

I know this was here,

I walked on these paths.

Maybe tonight

I'll dream about it,

it's very likely,

but just sitting here now

it's hard to imagine.

The Germans were fleeing.

They were in trucks,

cars,

on horseback,

and they were in a hurry

so they made us walk

faster than we were able.

Almost all of us

were skeletons by then.

They simply shot anyone

who couldn't keep up

and left him on the road.

We walked for three days

on all sorts of paths

and sideroads.

We were given no food

or drink,

and people around me

were dropping like flies.

They let us rest for the first time

and let us sleep a few hours

in an abandoned camp.

The next day they told us to line up

again to continue the march

and Young Perez was missing.

Then suddenly he showed up with

a big sack, bigger than himself,

and he called from afar:

I found bread, there's enough for all.

He wanted to join us.

The SS guard said: You're disrupting,

wait for the last column

and join the last column.

Perez said to the SS man

in the few words he knew

in German: My comrades...

And the SS man turned his back to him and

said: Stay here and join the last column.

Perez figured, what will he do to me?

and jumped over the ditch to join us

and laughed: Bread, friends, bread.

The SS man was fed up. He took his machine

gun and shot him. He died on the spot.

Of course there's no grave,

nothing remained of him.

A minute or two later

we were ordered to keep marching.

Here, you must understand...

You have to understand prisoners.

They're no longer human.

Firstly, they're just numbers.

Secondly, to the Germans

they're less than human.

Lower than cockroaches.

They'd step on us

like they'd step on a cockroach.

We had very little feeling left.

The death of a prisoner,

for us, was...

an ordinary occurrence.

Not of one, of dozens.

Anyone who wasn't there

can't possibly know,

can't understand,

can't comprehend it,

you can hear about it for hours,

days, read books about it,

but you'll never understand.

After a long, exhausting journey

on foot and in a freight train

we reached the Ravensbrück camp

in Germany.

The SS men made us build barricades

and anti-tank obstacles

and dig trenches.

All over Europe they're celebrating

the victory over the Nazis

while in Germany, the Germans decide

to evacuate Ravensbrück.

The prisoners are ordered

to set out on another death march.

I decided:

I'm not walking anymore.

I was sure

I couldn't take anymore.

This is the end,

and since it's the end

I might as well die sitting down,

why die marching down

some road?

And a few others

said the same thing.

Shells started whistling

over the camp

and the SS made everyone hurry,

they closed the camp gate,

about 100 of us stayed behind

and the others left

and not one of them

survived that march.

Day after day passed

and the shells flew

from both sides.

Then we suddenly heard

the sound of tanks.

The camp gate opened

and in came three officers,

we didn't know who they were.

We were afraid

the Germans were back.

One shouted to us in German:

Comrades, you're free.

We're the Red Army.

And we wanted to run

but we didn't have the strength,

so we walked quickly toward them

and suddenly two of them

stepped aside and vomited

and the third was green in the face

and had tears in his eyes.

We ask them: What's the matter?

And he points...

behind us. We turn around

and don't see anything.

He says again:

Over there.

He pointed at the piles of corpses.

We were used to seeing them.

It made no impression on us.

We didn't notice the stench, either.

We were used to it.

When I realized

I was free

I didn't know how to react.

How do you react?

Now I can do whatever I want.

I can eat,

I can walk around,

I can go back to France

and look for my parents.

But at first it meant nothing to me,

it was an abstract concept,

it seemed like it wasn't me,

it was someone else.

It took me a few days to get used to

the fact that this is me and I'm free,

I've survived it all

and now I'm free.

All those months in the camp

when I had no food,

I was always hungry,

I had hallucinations and dreams.

I dreamt I was sitting

at the breakfast table,

with coffee...

I could even smell the coffee.

And I'm eating two rolls with butter,

with cheese,

sometimes I hurried back

to the block in the evening

so I could lie down

and dream about my rolls,

about my breakfast.

I ate my first breakfast

with rolls

when we were in the British area.

That was the first time in years

that I ate a decent meal.

From Ravensbrück

they sent me to Paris.

They asked if we wanted

to go by train

which took 24 hours

or by plane.

Of course I'd never flown

so I asked to go by plane.

I flew in a DC-3, a Dakota,

the best plane that ever flew.

I didn't know what to do

because when I was liberated...

I found French POWs

and they knew what to do,

they went back to their families in France.

I had no idea about my family...

if there was even a family to find.

I tried to locate

my parents in Paris

but they weren't there.

From there I went to Belgium,

to Brussels, in search of them.

I hurried to a neighbor's house,

a non-Jew,

who was in the underground

with my father and me.

When he saw me

he embraced me and through

his emotion and tears asked:

Have you seen your parents?

They left here about half an hour ago

and went to Mr. Moses' house.

I understood that

my parents were alive.

I boarded the No. 5 streetcar

and went to the third carriage

where there was a balcony

and a man and woman stood there

and I stood a few meters

away from them

and after a few seconds

I hear the woman

whisper to the man:

Isn't that our Norbert?

They were my parents,

we were going to the same place.

And that's how I met them.

My mother

fainted, of course,

when she realized

I really was her Norbert.

That's one of the most

amazing stories I've ever heard

even though it's about me.

I couldn't believe

they were still alive.

How did they survive?

After all, I didn't know

what became of them.

My father was in Auschwitz I,

among other things he was

in charge of manpower lists in the camps.

Every day he was given forms

which listed who was still alive

and who wasn't

and my name was among them.

He erased names every day

but my name always remained.

First there were 45,

then 32 were left, then 27.

And on the day

Auschwitz was evacuated

there were two names left,

someone else and me.

So my father knew I was alive

almost to the last day.

He knew what became of his son.

When I was in Auschwitz

I said to myself:

If by some miracle

I should survive this hell,

I'll be an active Zionist

and I'll move to Palestine.

I realized that if the Jews

don't help themselves

they have no future.

The minute I was back in Belgium

I started to look for ways

to attain my goal.

Noah arrives in France

where he's recruited as a crew member

of a refugee ship.

On July 10th, 1947

Noah boards a refugee ship

on its way to the Promised Land.

The ship is named - Exodus.

Not only was I part of the odyssey

of the Exodus,

I was even a crew member,

and that was really...

No one could aspire to more.

The British decided

to put an end to the Second Aliyah

(wave of immigration).

They put us on three prison ships.

At the prow was an actual cage.

1,500 people on each ship.

They told us:

You're going to Cyprus

and when we awoke in the morning

we were heading back where we came from,

either France or Italy.

We decided to ask the 1,500 refugees

what to do

and their unanimous answer was:

We won't disembark in France.

We'll stay on board.

Either they take us to Palestine

or we die on board.

The deputy commander

of the Exodus, Micha Perry,

said that the decision to stay

on board would be pointless

if the refugees on the other two ships

disembarked.

We must find a way to tell the people

on at least one of the ships

not to disembark.

The question was how to contact

the other ships that were

some 300 meters away.

Then an idea came to me.

Why doesn't one of us

fall into the water?

He'll swim toward one of the ships,

and since they won't leave

a person to drown

they'll pick him up

and that way

we can deliver the message.

I wasn't even 21 yet,

I was an ardent Zionist,

I sat on the prow

as if I were tanning myself,

and Micha, who was in the cage,

gave me a sign, and I fell back.

It took a long time to reach the water

because it was a 13-meter fall.

I dove very deep until

I started swimming back up,

I surfaced and said to myself:

Here, Noah,

you did it.

Now you're a hero.

You've saved the Zionist enterprise,

the Second Aliyah,

the Jewish state,

you'll be in the history books.

Like they write about Herzl,

they'll write about Noah Klieger

who singlehandedly saved

the whole enterprise.

You're a hero,

forever.

I floated on my back

and waited for the Ocean Vigour

to stop,

lower a boat

and all would be well.

And what happens?

The Ocean Vigour doesn't stop.

Not only doesn't it stop,

it changes direction

and sails away from me.

And I'm stuck in the middle

of the Mediterranean.

How do I get out of this?

I said: Idiot, why did you say

you're a swimmer?

I told some girls I was

to impress them.

Not only won't you be a hero,

you've done nothing.

You're a total failure.

What will your parents say?

He survived Auschwitz

and ended up drowning.

No one will tell them the real story,

that I tried to do a heroic deed,

instead, "He fell in and drowned."

Then I hear a siren.

I figured I was hallucinating.

I lower my arms

and I feel something there.

The British sent a minesweeper

to find me.

It was a miracle that I survived.

They just happened to find me.

They almost ran me over.

They didn't think they'd find me.

"4,500 Jews Refuse to Leave Ships

"for Shelter Offered by France"

I was one of the few kids who,

when they were asked:

"What do you want to be?"

said: "A journalist,"

and really became a journalist.

I've worked at Yedioth Aharonoth

since 1957.

That's 58 years

if I'm not mistaken.

I'm a journalist,

the oldest member

of the editorial staff

of a daily newspaper in the world.

No one is older.

I should be in

the Guinness Book of World Records

but I don't have the ambition,

I'm not cut out for that.

It's the greatest compliment

a man can receive,

being kept on

when he's almost 90

since they consider him useful.

That truly is flattering.

My father was a great

author and journalist.

When he moved to Israel

he had a "parliament"

that met every day

and he'd show them the newspaper

that said "Noah Klieger,"

"That's my son."

He was proud of me!

It's incredible,

all my life I was proud of him,

and here he is, proud of me.

My life has been a mosaic

of sadness and joy,

disappointments and gratification,

pleasure and pride.

I've lived the life I've chosen

and if I had to start all over

I'd choose the very same life.

Except, of course, the years

of horror that the Nazis gave us.

But there too

I was lucky

because heaven or destiny

or both

allowed me to return from hell

and start a new, fascinating life.

That is...

a normal life.

An honorary Doctorate in Philosophy

is awarded to the venerated

veteran journalist Noah Klieger of Israel.