January 27 is the spiritual, though not biological, birthday of my late twin friend Otto Klein, who may have met Elisavetskii on that 1945 day that brought Dr Mengele's experiments on him to an end.
In November 2000 I flew on a chartered plane day trip from Geneva to Auschwitz with him, four other survivors and 150 Swiss schoolteachers learning how to teach the Shoah to Swiss school kids. It was during the spike in anti-semitism in Switzerland due to the Swiss banks' stonewalling survivors' descendants about their relatives' assets in dormant Swiss bank accounts. We toured the camp and I saw Otto laconically describe to the Swiss schoolteachers the last time he saw his parents at the age of 11. He and his brother Frank (Ferencz) and their sister survived.
At the time I had a Swiss banker friend in NY from a Swiss village near Zurich. He told me all about how his childhood friends were telling him that he was a traitor to Switzerland by taking the Jews' side against the Swiss banks. They voiced all the old vicious stereotypes about Jews and money, unintentionally proving how anti-semitism, the world's oldest hatred, is also a conspiracy theory about how hidden power works in the world. It's a virus that never dies. It just hibernates in time of stability and prosperity, ready to replicate like a socio-political form of COVID in more volatile periods. Unlike with COVID, there is no known vaccine beyond relentless whack-a-mole vigilance and education. Otto Klein spent his life in Switzerland giving interviews and going to schools to talk to kids about his Auschwitz experience as a warning.
