The Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health’s (LACDMH) Gloria Mendez, Psychiatric Social Worker II and Brian Navarro, Psychiatric Social Worker II, led the Service Areas 4 and 5 Clergy Collaborations to Los Angeles’ Holocaust Museum in Pan Pacific Park on May 22. The event’s highlights were hearing from Joe Alexander, a 102-year-old Holocaust survivor, artifact donations, and a museum tour.
Alexander, a U.S. resident since 1949, was a 16-year-old Polish Jew when the Nazis invaded in 1938. His family was forcibly displaced to the Warsaw Ghetto before he was sent to the first of many concentration camps. Throughout his time in different concentration camps, Alexander went face-to-face with the “Angel of Death,” Josef Mengele, at Auschwitz. He was sorted by the German officer into a group to be led off for death but miraculously snuck his way from the extermination line into another line for forced labor. Alexander also persevered through death marches and forced labor to survive the war.
Alexander, a U.S. resident since 1949, was a 16-year-old Polish Jew when the Nazis invaded in 1938. His family was forcibly displaced to the Warsaw Ghetto before he was sent to the first of many concentration camps. Throughout his time in different concentration camps, Alexander went face-to-face with the “Angel of Death,” Josef Mengele, at Auschwitz. He was sorted by the German officer into a group to be led off for death but miraculously snuck his way from the extermination line into another line for forced labor. Alexander also persevered through death marches and forced labor to survive the war.
An emotional audience dabbed at tears as a stoic Alexander rolled up his left sleeve to reveal a tattooed identification number and shared his harrowing tales of overcoming death through hope before being rescued by U.S. soldiers in Landsberg am Lech in 1945.
“The Americans were there, and I was safe,” Alexander told the Los Angeles Daily News and FBI agents in 2024. “I survived. Hitler didn’t.”
Eventually, Alexander made his way to Pennsylvania through New York City in 1949 and eventually to Santa Monica in 1950 to live alongside his cousin.
The event also featured an artifact donation to the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum by Abel Acuna and led by Chaplain Ruth Belonsky, a member of the LACDMH Faith-based Advocacy Council and Service Area 5 Clergy Roundtable. Acuna disclosed to the group that his home was destroyed in the Palisades fire, with only a few remaining memories tucked in storage.
Acuna’s family survived the Holocaust and moved to Argentina. His aunt passed along a vest and an armband with a golden star — a signifier of being a Jew during the Nazi occupation — which Acuna kindly donated to the museum for preservation.
There was a shared ominous feeling among visitors who viewed the museum and listened to Alexander. Museum tour guides took LACDMH staff and visitors through exhibits showing how Germany used racism, book burning, propaganda, lies and media manipulation to exterminate Jews, people with disabilities, Poles, Romani, and more.
