Playing in the Auschwitz cabaret
By CNN's Aaron Brown
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Max Garcia, a retired San Francisco architect, doesn't need an anniversary to remind him of Auschwitz.
"Here I am, 60 years later. Every day, every day that I wake up is a day I stole from the Nazis," he says.
Garcia grew up in Amsterdam. His younger sister died in Auschwitz, his parents in other camps.
He arrived in Auschwitz in July 1943, and 14 months later he became part of what is preposterous even in words: a cabaret at Aushcwitz started by another prisoner with good connections, his friend Lex.
"He got a little combo together, five or six of us, he went to the SS officer in charge of his unit and said, 'This is what I want to do.' He laughed at him he said, 'Not a chance in hell.' But he persisted, and we finally got the OK to do it.
"So every Sunday after that, we had a cabaret performance in Auschwitz in the main camp upstairs in the barracks. I believe it was block No. 2. "My only task was to be the emcee, tell the jokes, introduce the next song they would play. I had never been in the entertainment world. I had nothing to hang my hat on.
"We thought we would put this on for the fellow prisoners, although most of the other prisoners had other things to worry about. But the prominent prisoners could take time off.
"But what was the surprise for us was that the SS guards came to the performance. They also needed entertainment. The only thing we were told at the time, Lex was told, 'Be sure to tell your people no jokes about Hitler, no jokes about Nazism or fascism, nothing political, you will be immediately stopped.'"
The SS guards sat in the first two rows.
"It was always a high wire act in many ways. We were always there, but we had to be cautious in what we did. If we stepped out of bounds and got some SS officer pissed off at us, we could be dead the next day.
"We didn't know we were balancing the act until after we were liberated. We didn't know how audacious we had been, how much chutzpah we actually had to promote this thing and do it. That we didn't undertsand at the time."
Sixty years later, the cabaret is not something Garcia dwells on. The burden of survival is too complicated for that, too real.
"Nightmares are a constant reminder of how lucky you are that you are still alive. They waken you, you are full of sweat, you can scream at times, you see the whole thing in front of you all over again. There is not a goddamn thing you can do about it. You have to relive it. It's our ordeal."
