Holocaust Survivor Celebrates 90th Birthday in Auschwitz With 100 Descendants
Chabad scholar and author Rabbi Nissen Mangel celebrated the triumph of good over evil with four generations
By Tzemach Feller November 2, 2023 5:24 PM
Rabbi Nissen Mangel’s entire life has been a miracle.
He was a 10-year-old child when he came to Auschwitz in a clattering cattle car stuffed with humanity.
Not many 10-year-olds were sent to the right, towards life, by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. But Mangel was.
Not many 10-year-olds survived Mengele’s sadistic human experiments. But Mangel did.
And not many 10-year-olds survived five other slave labor and concentration camps and a forced death march in the dead of winter.
But Mangel not only survived, he thrived.
“My father’s motto in life is: Hodu LaHashem—‘Give thanks to G‑d,’ ” Rabbi Nochum Mangel, who directs Chabad-Lubavitch of Greater Dayton in Ohio, told chabad.org. “And his message was the same for the future. Hitler tried the final solution and he failed, and the Nazis of today—Hamas—will fail as well.”
The trip was the product of a complaint.
Mangel’s children, who serve in leadership positions around the world, many as Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries, would get together from time to time, and had, on occasion, traveled to Europe to retrace their father’s early life.
“My father always wanted his children to go see where he grew up—Košice, Slovakia—and also Auschwitz, where he was taken,” Nochum Mangel related.
But the grandchildren felt left out. They, too, wished to participate in the family pilgrimages, to understand the horror their grandfather had endured and his gratefulness to G‑d for surviving.