Holocaust survivor to share harrowing tale at war museum

An Ottawa Holocaust survivor is bringing his story of survival to the Canadian War Museum Thursday, a story that included two of the worst Nazi concentration camps.

Speaking to CBC's Robyn Bresnahan on Ottawa Morning Thursday, David Mosckovic said he was a teenager in a small village in the mountains of Czechoslovakia when one day in 1944, his family was told they would have to leave.

They were taken out of the community on wagons and forced to sleep in a brickyard before being loaded onto trains.

The trains took him to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, where he narrowly escaped death.

"I went to the right with my dad and my mom went to the left. We found out later [the other group] went straight to the gas chambers," he said.

"They were actually the lucky ones, because they went to the gas chambers and they didn't suffer."

From there he was assigned to a work camp, where they were barely fed and more people died.

He said when Russian soldiers got close to the camp, the Nazi guards forced them to the Buchenwald camp.

"We marched for two or three days without food, without anything."

Mosckovic said he survived there by playing dead at times until finally, the camp was liberated in the spring of 1945.

He said he moved to Canada and originally didn't want to talk about his experiences or even acknowledge he was Jewish.

Mosckovic will tell his story at an sold-out event Thursday night called "The enduring importance of eyewitness accounts," organized by the museum and Carleton's Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship.