5
A young man of twenty, Salamo Arouch arrived at Auschwitz in 1943 along with fifty thousand other Greek Jews. The railway boxcar journey to the camp had been harrowing; by the time the train arrived in Auschwitz, the air in the boxcar was permeated with the stink of urine and feces. A few had vomited. Some had wrapped articles of clothing around their faces to filter out the nauseating odor. When the prisoners detrained, they were hungry and dehydrated. Arouch had no idea what to expect, but he knew it would be bad. He didn’t yet know of the gas chambers and crematoriums, but he knew—from looking around—that he was now in a prison where the inmates looked as if they had been starved and beaten: they were skeletal and bruised; their eyes and cheeks were sunken. Their skin was as pale gray as that of corpses. They were the walking dead. A sleek black Mercedes was driven up to the waiting inmates. A low-ranked soldier-driver opened his own door then opened the door for the rear-seated passenger. The commandant emerged like the master of a plantation. There he stood: his head capped with a peaked visor sporting the Nazi eagle, a swastika emblem, and a death’s head skull, his feet encased in shiny black boots, and his torso draped in an elegant black-leather coat decorated with two rows of silver buttons and a red-and-black swastika armband. The commandant surveyed with surly superiority the desperate faces before him. He barked that the newcomers should stand at attention, then looking them over, he asked if there were any boxers present. Arouch dutifully raised his hand and was directed to step forward. “You’re a boxer?” “Yes.” “You’re too short and skinny to be a boxer.” “I am, and I can prove it.”
With a stick, the commandant drew a large circle in the dirt. He directed Arouch to enter the circle then instructed another inmate to join Arouch. The two men were each given worn-out pairs of old boxing gloves to put on their fists. They put on the gloves then looked at the commandant for instruction. Their expressions radiated fear and anxiety. The commandant asked their names. Arouch’s opponent was a frightened young man named Chaim who had some experience as a boxer. “Now fight!” ordered the commandant. In a matter of minutes, Arouch had flattened his opponent with a left to the temple and a right to the jaw. The commandant was impressed but still skeptical; he wanted additional evidence that Arouch was a boxer. He directed a 6-foot, 200-pound Czech to enter the ring with the 135-pound, 5-foot 6-inch Arouch. Like many short boxers engaged in taking on a taller man, Arouch knew the importance of attacking the midsection of an opponent and how to get under his arms and punch up to the jaw and the side of his head. He would have to land his punches rapidly then move out of the range of the taller man’s fists. He did not want to get his head pummeled. It was a technique made famous years later in America by heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, who used his short arms to get under the longer arms of his opponents. Arouch aimed his jabs at the Czech’s jaw and head, then he would move away, coming back to attack the Czech’s midsection and kidneys. A couple of punches may have landed on the man’s genitals. Arouch’s punches were rapid-fire rights and lefts. As quickly as he moved, Arouch could not avoid receiving several blows to the top of his head. Yet he had managed to soften up his target who seemed confused about where Arouch’s next blows would land. Sensing his advantage, Arouch delivered a solid right to the Czech’s solar plexus then another to his liver. The big Czech folded like a half-cut tree, and Arouch delivered a devastating right upper-cut to his opponent’s jaw that caused the man to topple to the ground.
No wonder Arouch won the bout. His father had taught him the elements of the sweet science when Arouch was fourteen years old. He learned a classic style of boxing that was based on throwing a series of left jabs followed by right crosses. The technique served him well. By age seventeen, he had won the middleweight championship of Greece and the Balkans, and by 1939 his record stood at 24 wins, 0 losses. He was chosen to be a member of the Greek Olympic Boxing Team but never got to participate. Instead he was drafted into the Greek army, becoming a member of the army’s boxing team, and he proceeded to have three successful bouts that ended when he knocked out each of his opponents. Because of his clever and fast foot movements in the ring, he was known as “the ballet dancer” and to some as “the ballerina.”
His hometown of Salonica (Thessalonica), where he was born in 1923, celebrated Arouch’s achievements in the ring. He was also the pride of the local Jewish population, and Salonica had a long-established history of Jewish life going back two thousand years. The city came to be known as the “Mother of Israel.” It had the largest Jewish population of any city in Greece. Jewish life in Greece was settled and traditional. There were synagogues that dated to the second century BCE. And even Aristotle wrote of his friendship with a Jewish philosopher from Syria who he said not only spoke fluent Greek but had the soul of a Greek. While Jews had enjoyed friendly relations with their non-Jewish neighbors for centuries, the climate of friendship turned cloudy in some quarters after the Italian fascist army invaded the country on October 28, 1940. The Italians invaded because the Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas had refused to capitulate to an ultimatum issued by Mussolini. In response to the invasion, 12,898 Greek Jews joined the Greek army. They thought of themselves as being as Greek as anyone else, and they patriotically fought against the invasion of their home-land by Italian fascists in Albania and Macedonia. According to Martin Gilbert, “613 Jews from Salonica were killed in action, and 1,412 became total invalids. Among the Jews who fought was the Greek national hero Mordechai Fraggi, who was killed in action.”1
The Greek army succeeded in driving the fascists out of their county, but then in 1941 there was a powerful Werhmacht invasion of Greece. Again the Jewish soldiers fought alongside their fellow Greeks against the Werhmacht onslaught. The Jews were celebrated as dedicated fighters. There were so many Jewish soldiers in the 50th Brigade of the Greek army that it was commonly known as the Cohen Battalion. It didn’t matter, for the Greeks were overwhelmed by the enormity of the Nazi forces, which occupied Salonica and Macedonia on April 9, 1941.
Soldiers of the Greek army had put up a valiant fight against the Nazis, but they had been outnumbered and outgunned. The Greeks had been no match for the enormously powerful Nazi war machine. Once the Nazi jackboot pressed down on the necks of their Greek victims, there was little the Greeks could do to protect their Jewish countrymen. Yet here and there a few heroic endeavors helped save the lives of Jews. In Athens, for example, more than 1,200 Jews were saved from Nazi liquidation by the issuance of false identity cards supplied by Archbishop Damaskinos and Police Chief Angelos Ebert.
However, such acts of decency could not prevent a slow, steady, and inexorable tide of anti-Jewish laws from being enacted and enforced as in other conquered lands. Max Merten, a German citizen, was put in charge by the Nazis for overseeing the enforcement of anti-Jewish rules in Salonica. He quickly banned all Jewish newspapers and welcomed the distribution of two pro-Nazi newspapers: Nea Evropi (New Europe) and Apogevmatini (Evening Press). Jewish homes and community centers were given to the Nazi occupiers. All radios that were owned by Jews had to be turned over to the occupiers, and Jews were banned from all restaurants and cafes. Denied access to food, particularly as a result of a brutal famine, sixty Jews a day died from starvation from 1941 through 1942. On July 11, 1942, many Jews felt their lives as Greek citizens were about to end. The day became known as the Black Shabbat, for on that day Max Merten ordered that all men age 18 to 45 of the city of Salonica were to be rounded up like cattle and corralled in Eleftherias Square (Freedom Square). While in the square the Jews were forced to spend hours performing calisthenics while guns were pointed at them. The Jews were told that anyone who did not perform would be regarded as a traitor and shot. Four thousand of the strongest-looking men were selected to construct a road linking Salonica to Keterini and Larissa, where there was an epidemic of malaria. After ten weeks of hard work and little food, 480 of those originally chosen died from either exhaustion or starvation or malaria. Those who were not chosen for hard labor were transported to Auschwitz.2
While the Jews labored under barbaric conditions, there were Greeks, both Jews and non-Jews, who wanted the release of the Jewish slave laborers. To effect the release, Merten and the Nazis demanded a payment of 3.5 billion drachmas. The community was able to come up with 2 billion. The other 1.5 billion could not be raised no matter how hard and desperate were the efforts to do so. In exchange for the lower amount of drachmas, the residents of Salonica would have to give up ownership of the Jewish cemetery, which contained from 300,000 to 500,000 graves. Once the cemetery was in German hands, its destruction commenced. However, the destruction proceeded too slowly for the Germans who were in charge of overseeing the removal of all the gravestones, so they ordered local government officials to hire five hundred additional workers to speedily destroy the cemetery. When the destruction was complete, the cemetery was turned into a massive quarry where broken gravestones were turned into building materials. (Today the cemetery is the site of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.)
While the destruction continued, Jews found life in Salonica so restrictive that five thousand of them departed for the safety of the Italian zone.3 Unfortunately, that safe haven did not weather the storm of occupation and vicious anti-Semitism. Of those who did not leave for the Italian zone, there were 250 angry and determined Jews who joined the Greek People’s Liberation Army and the National Liberation Front and fought guerilla battles against the occupiers. They not only fought against the occupiers, they also fought against the thousands of traitorous Greeks who served the Nazis. Historians now estimate that more than twenty thousand Greek citizens collaborated with the Nazis.
By 1943, the plight of the Jews of Salonica had become even more ominous. To deal with the “Jewish Question,” the Nazis sent two of their more vicious anti-Semitic SS ideologues to Salonica on February 6, 1943. They were Alois Brunner and Dieter Wisliceny. Brunner, as Adolf Eichmann’s assistant, was responsible for sending more than 100,000 Jews to concentration camps. He was also the commandant of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris, and from there he sent 24,000 Jews to concentration camps. Following the end of the war, he escaped capture and trial as a war criminal by going to Syria, where he joined the Ba’ath Party and became a salaried employee of the government, giving advice on how to administer torture techniques while interrogating prisoners. Wisliceny made sure that all the Jews of Salonica were confined to a ghetto. He then determined when they should be sent to a death camp and killed. He was known as an expert on efficient means of liquidating the Reich’s enemies. Unlike Brunner, he was not able to escape after the war, and in 1948, he was extradited to Czechoslovakia, tried for war crimes, and met his fate dangling at the end of a hangman’s rope.
Shortly after their arrival, Brunner and Wisliceny eagerly set about their mission. First they ordered that all Jews display a yellow Star of David on their garments. Those who failed to do so would be shot without explanation. After Brunner and Wisliceny had confined the Jews to several ghettos, they further circumscribed their freedom: Jews were restricted to specific neighborhoods and could go about only during a few prescribed hours each day. Violators would be shot on the spot. By the end of February 1943, the anti-Semitic laws had resulted in all Jews being confined to three ghettos: Kalamaria, Singrou, and Vardar/Agia Paraskevi. From there it became easy for the SS to transfer the inhabitants to the Baron Hirsch Transit Camp, which was adjacent to a railroad station. There Salamo Arouch and thousands of other Greek Jews were forced into boxcars to take them to the death camps. Unfortunately for the Jewish captives, the SS were able to employ the services of a Jewish police force headed by Vital Hasson. He was not only head of the police that drove the Jews to their death, he was also a bounty hunter for the Nazis. He would cross borders to search for Jews who had escaped Nazi roundups and bring them to the SS. In addition, he stole jewels from Jewish women, often raping them and pimping them to the Nazis. He was so cold-blooded and callous that he did nothing to save his parents from a trip to a death camp. It was not until 1946 that the allies caught up with Hasson, who had been on the run, and turned him over to Greek authorities. He was tried, sentenced to death, and executed.
The death trains to which Hasson delivered his fellow Jews began departing Greece on March 15, 1943. He was able to cram 1,000 to 4,000 Jews onto a train, which went either to Auschwitz or to Treblinka. The deportations ended on August 7, 1943, after all the Jews of Salonica had been sent to concentration camps. Upon their arrival, nearly 90 percent of the Jews were immediately sent to gas chambers and then cremated. The Arouch family, five in all, were among those carted off like cattle to their fate in Auschwitz. Oddly, more than three hundred Jews who claimed Spanish ancestry were sent to Barcelona and Morocco.
Arouch, his father, his mother, three younger sisters, and his brother Avram arrived at Auschwitz on March 15, 1943. It was about 6 p.m., and the prisoners were in a state of confusion, panic, and desperation. A distraught Arouch spotted a friend from Salonica. He asked where all the others whom he had known from the ghetto were now housed. He was told that they had all been gassed and incinerated. Arouch thought his friend was delusional, driven mad by desperation. However, he soon came to realize that his friend was not delusional, for shortly thereafter Arouch’s mother and sisters were gassed and incinerated. Still later, he learned that his father, who had grown too weak for slave labor, had also been gassed. Then his brother was shot for refusing to remove the gold fillings from the teeth of gassed Jews.
Arouch may have been destined for the same fate as the rest of his family. Before he could demonstrate the pugilistic skills that would save his life, he was taken away by SS guards, stripped of his clothing, and hosed down and disinfected like a farm animal. His head was then shaved and his arm tattooed with a serial number, 136954. Branded, he was treated like a beast awaiting slaughter. Poked with sticks, whipped, and driven to the center of the camp with the other new arrivals, he had to stand at attention as the commandant addressed the prisoners. It was at that time that Arouch got to prove himself a proficient boxer, a role he would have to perform sometimes two or three times a week for nearly two years. It would keep him alive as long as he kept winning his bouts.
Upon observing Arouch’s winning skills, the commandant exclaimed, “Look what we have here! A real Yid fighter.” From then on Arouch was spared from performing hard labor. He was assigned to be a clerk and given sufficiently minimum nourishment so that he could continue as a camp boxer. He said that the fights were like cockfights where the guards cheered, cursed, and bet on the winners. And Arouch was always a winner, fighting desperately not to be sent to the gas chambers.
His most difficult fight was against a German-Jewish boxer named Klaus Silber. The German had an even more impressive pre-camp record than Arouch, for he had won 44 bouts and lost none. He was a favorite of the commandant and the guards, for even at Auschwitz he had never lost a bout. Silber was favored to win and very few of the guards were willing to bet on Arouch. By the time Silber and Arouch were matched to fight, Silber had won 100 fights in the camp. His record placed him at the pinnacle of the camp’s boxers. The match-up of Arouch and Silber generated the kind of excitement that one would expect from a world-class fight between two internationally celebrated athletes. Even the commandant expressed his good fortune in having two superb athletes ready to kill one another for the pleasure of the SS.
As the two boxers approached the ring, the excitement of the crowd was palpable. The guards shouted encouragement to Silber, their favored boxer, and abuse at Arouch whom they all expected to see dragged off to the gas chambers following his loss. The two men came at each other like blood-thirsty pit bull terriers, each knowing that the loser would likely be killed. From the opening bell, their fists flew with the intensity of bullets. Each landed as many punches as possible while attempting to block and slip punches that could result in a knockout. Their energy seemed to come from multiple shots of adrenalin. Desperation and grim determination shone in their eyes. Their rapid-fire fists kept the audience enthralled, some of whom enthusiastically pantomimed upper cuts and hooks. Though bruised and bloodied, neither man gave evidence of experiencing pain. The blood flowed and dribbled, red welts grew around their eyes, but neither boxer gave an inch. Their intensity was propelled by the possibility of defeat. Their arms grew tired, they breathed heavily, they staggered about the ring, but no man was going to show a hint of weakness.
Then Silber found an opening and delivered a short, hard right that Arouch was unable to block. The punch seemed to have come out of nowhere. That right landed on the point of Arouch’s chin, causing his head to snap backward, then flop forward. Arouch went down like a suddenly tranquilized animal. Arouch lay on the canvas for no more than three or four seconds then shook his dazed head, dispersing clouds of confusion from his mind. He scrambled to his feet, fists flying at Silber, who looked surprised that Arouch had been able to recover so quickly and commence a wild onslaught. At first Arouch certainly looked as if he had been knocked unconscious and should have been out for a full count, if not longer. But Arouch was fighting for his life and he was not about to surrender his life to men who wouldn’t think twice about executing him. He must fight on, no matter how hard it was to continue. He went after Silber with the ferocity of an angry wounded animal. And he certainly looked wounded: the skin around is eyes was swollen and discolored, his lower lip was torn and bleeding. Blood poured out of his nose. Yet he was unstoppable. He delivered a devastating combination of blows, causing Silber to reel backward. Then Arouch delivered two rapid-fire jackhammer rights to Silber’s jaw. Silber collapsed like a marionette with cut strings. He lay unconscious, blood dribbling from his gums where a tooth had been dislodged. More blood flowed from his broken nose. As his arms lay limp at his sides, he was dragged away by his ankles like a dead bull that had died from the matador’s final thrust. Silber was never to be seen again. For the SS it was great entertainment having two Jews attempt to kill each other though a few complained that they had bet on the wrong boxer. For Arouch, his win meant that he had another day to live in hell. And in the hell of the boxing bouts in the camp, Arouch knew he had been forced to be the instrument of Silber’s deadly end, but he also knew that he was the solitary instrument of his own survival.
And so it went for Arouch. He went on to double Silber’s winning record, winning during the course of his imprisonment two hundred fights. Two of his fights ended in draws because Arouch was suffering from dysentery, but draws, fortunately, were not death sentences, and so Arouch remained a betting favorite for the SS and it was hard to find anyone willing to bet on his opponents. Arouch’s performances in the ring were widely popular and he never disappointed those who cheered him on. It is ironic that those who cheered for him to win were also the same men who would have delivered him to the gas chambers had he lost.
In addition to allowing Arouch to live, winning resulted in an extra portion of bread (sometimes even a full loaf) and soup and an occasional piece of rotted meat. For the losers who were not immediately taken out and shot or gassed, losing resulted in significantly reduced food allotments or no food for several days. The malnourishment and weakness that would follow meant that the loser would be too weak for slave labor and would be killed, a useless commodity. Arouch hated it all. He hated the guards, he hated what happened to his opponents, he hated the world that would permit such bestiality to continue. But his choices were starkly existential: fight or die.
The choice at one point became more agonizing than usual. There was a boxer at Auschwitz named Jacko Razon. He had been a boyhood friend of Arouch from Salonica. Their friendship had developed because, as teenagers, they had both fallen in love with boxing and often trained together. By 1944, Razon was proving to be one of the few unbeatable boxers at the camp. He was another Silber: he had won 120 fights at the camp, and the SS was eager to watch a match between Razon and Arouch. They speculated on who would survive such a match. Having trained together in Salonica, each man knew the style, the strengths, and weaknesses of the other. It wasn’t only as journeymen boxers that they knew each other. They had also been members of the Greek army boxing team. Following the army’s defeat and surrender to the conquering Nazis, Razon was taken into captivity and sent to Auschwitz.
Each man trained for the fight, perhaps wishing that a deus ex machina would prevent the fight from taking place. However, it was no artificial rescue that prevented the fight. Instead, it was the advance of Allied forces that resulted in the camp’s liberation. The two men felt a profound sense of relief. Fate, however, plays tricks on those who think that fortunes have been made and misfortunes painted over.
When the movie Triumph of the Spirit, about Arouch’s time as a concentration camp boxer, was released, Razon was incensed. The story, he claimed, was about him, not Arouch. He sued the producers of the movie, and an out-of-court settlement was reached. How many men forced to box for the pleasure of murderous Nazi guards would also have felt that Arouch’s story was theirs? There were other superb Jewish boxers at the camp including Victor (Young) Perez (see chapter 3), Kid Francis, and Leone Efrati. Arouch did not get to fight those three, all of whom were murdered by the Nazis. Whether Arouch would have beaten those boxers is a game for pundits of pugilism to play. Efrati had been ranked the tenth-best featherweight in 1939 by the National Boxing Association. He lost a chance to win the NBA featherweight title in a bout against Leo Rodak at the Coliseum in Chicago. The decision awarding the win to Rodak was hotly disputed by Efrati and his manager, and it has been speculated that if the Italian-born fighter and resident of Chicago had won, he would not have been deported to Italy and sent to Auschwitz by the Nazis, where he was murdered in 1944. He was inducted into the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2000. Kid Francis, whose birth name was Francesco Buonaugurio, was born in Naples in 1907. He appeared on the cover of Ring Magazine in 1931 and was known for his appreciation of classical literature, especially the writings of Ovid. At a slim but muscular 5'4" and having fought well in 135 bouts, he was a dominant figure in the bantamweight division. When the Nazis conquered France, the Kid, who was living in Marseilles at the time, was captured and sent to Auschwitz, where he was murdered in 1943.
Those who survived and were strong enough for hard manual labor were woken each day at 4 a.m. They were given a watery breakfast, marched outside, and told to get to work. Those who did not work fast enough received a few lashes of a whip or strikes from a wooden cane or pounding from a rubber hose. As long as Arouch kept winning, he had the privileged position of a clerk. He could see the other prisoners suffering during the day and marched back to their barracks at nightfall. If Arouch was assigned to kitchen duty, he would smuggle morsels of bread for those who slept near him. They gratefully gobbled whatever crumbs Arouch was able to give them. Those slave laborers, during the bitter coldness of winter, wearing nothing but pajamas or rags, often developed frostbite on their fingers and toes and so became candidates for death. Even some of the older boxers were sent to the gas chambers to make room for younger boxers who had recently arrived at the camp. The turnover from the death of overworked inmates and the arrival of new inmates meant a continuing high level of productivity, and the Nazis were, if nothing else, devotees of high levels of productivity. The moving assembly line for maximizing the production of cars has been attributed to Henry Ford (a hero of the Nazis and the only American celebrated in Mein Kampf), but the assembly line for maximizing the use and disposal of human lives was purely a Nazi phenomenon.
Life was so grim and desolation so widespread that for many of the inmates death was preferable to days of torturous existence. For still others, there was the desperate hope of escape. One night Arouch was invited to join a team of ten inmates who were planning to escape. The ten inmates, some of whom were boxers, decided they would rather attempt an escape than end up killed like unproductive and useless farm animals. Arouch thought it over and decided he had a better chance of survival as long as he could continue winning his boxing matches. He declined to go but wished his fellow inmates success. The ten managed to breach the gates and escape into nearby surroundings. The SS were soon aware of the escape, alarms were sounded, search-lights were directed along the perimeter of the camp, and guards with trained German shepherds were sent out to search for the escapees. The dogs barked as their handlers ran toward where the escaped men were hiding or running. The escapees knew what awaited them if they were captured. They split up, each man taking a different route. It was useless. They failed to elude their captors, and they were brought back to the camp at the points of rifles and bayonets. Once on the grounds of the camp, they were beaten and stomped on. Their bloodied bodies, still alive, were given over to hangmen who lynched them for all the inmates to see. Their bodies were left dangling until their flesh rotted and was food for insects and birds.
For still others, revolt against the guards was their only option. A number of Jews, upon arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau, had been forced into the Sonderkommandos (Special Commandos—a word euphemistically used to disguise the actual work of the disposal units). The job of the Sonderkommandos was to dispose of the bodies of those who had been gassed and incinerated. The members of the Sonderkommandos were forced to do as they were ordered on pain of death. On October 7, 1944, they revolted and attacked Nazi concentration camp guards.
It was an enterprise of supreme hazard, and of supreme courage…. More than three hundred Greek Jews were among the Sonderkommando preparing for revolt, among them Errera de Larissa, a former lieutenant in the Greek Army…. Some of the Sonderkommando at Crematorium IV attacked the SS so viciously with axes, picks, and crowbars that several SS men sought cover behind the barbed-wire fence, shooting at the prisoners with their pistols…. The arrival of SS reinforcements on motorcycles, from the SS barracks inside Birkenau, brought the revolt at Crematorium IV to an end. All those who had taken up weapons, and all who had set fire to the crematorium roof were machine gunned.4
Though all the inmates who revolted were killed, they managed to take twenty guards with them to their graves. The Jews had also succeeded in blowing up the crematorium, a accomplishment for which they were honored after the war.
Bob Young, director of Triumph of the Spirit, told me that he spent three months at Auschwitz during the filming. While he was able to imagine the desolation and cruelty endured by the inmates, it was nothing compared to what the inmates actually had to endure. “It can only be imagined,” he said.5
Liberation from the hellish camp could not have come too soon. While Auschwitz was liberated on January 24, 1945, by Soviet Union soldiers of the First Army of the Ukrainian Front commanded by Marshall Koniev, Arouch was not among those liberated, for he had been transferred to Bergen-Belsen on January 17. He had to wait until April 15, 1945, to be liberated by British troops. Arouch was lucky to still be alive: more than fifty thousand inmates had died at the camp. Because Arouch’s life as an inmate had consisted of boxing to stay alive, it was not a habit easily broken. Arouch asked British officers if they knew of any boxers who might like to fight in an exhibition for the entertainment of the liberating troops. Two boxers were found, and in quick succession Arouch knocked out each one.
The allies were appalled by what the SS had engineered at Bergen-Belsen, and those in charge were put on trial. In the autumn of 1945, the British military established a tribunal in Luneburg, where 48 guards—37 of whom were members of the SS, and 11 others—were charged with war crimes. The camp commander, Josef Kramer, and 11 others were found guilty and sentenced to death. The executions were carried out on December 12, 1945. Of the other defendants, 19 were sentenced to prison and 14 were acquitted.
Arouch had had enough of Europe. While many had resisted the Nazis, many more turned a blind eye to their atrocities or were conveniently complicit in their activities. Many camp inmates, after being confined to displaced person camps, washed their hands of Europe and sailed to either the United States or to Palestine, where they desperately fought to have a Jewish homeland that would protect them from future holocausts.
In Israel, Arouch met and married another Bergen-Belsen camp survivor, seventeen-year-old Marta Yechiel, who had also been a citizen of Salonica. The couple had four children. Settled in Tel Aviv in the soon to be recognized state of Israel, Arouch enlisted in the Israeli Defense Forces and ferociously fought to establish a homeland for himself, his family, and all those who had survived the Holocaust. He fought as hard as he had for his survival at Auschwitz. He was determined that he and his family would prosper. He fought again in the Six-Day War. As a civilian, he managed a shipping and moving company and agreed to one last boxing match. On June 8, 1955, he entered the ring in Tel Aviv to fight Italy’s Amleto Falcinelli. Arouch was knocked out in the 4th round. The need to punch his way out of a death sentence had left him years earlier. He was now a free man, no longer fighting just to survive. His long and heroic life ended at age eighty-six on April 26, 2009, following a stroke.