My father placed his leg across a train track in Sachsenhausen concentration camp and waited.

He weighed 85 pounds. He had calculated exactly which wheel would shatter the bone without severing the leg. He had nothing left to lose — except the future he refused to stop believing in.

Every day that we wake up is a blessing. But on Yom HaShoah I am struck by the true miracle of my simply being alive — not because I survived some science-defying surgery or escaped a battlefield, but because I am the eldest child of a man who incredulously survived the Holocaust.

On this day that we honor the six million and pay tribute to those who survived to birth the generation I call my own, I feel profound awe at the life my father’s survival made possible.

My existence was not inevitable. Every single living person on earth is the product of a unique intersection of time and place — one second earlier, two seconds later, and you would not have been. My father should have died every moment of every day from September 1939 through April 1945. Instead he lived through an avalanche of unfathomable, unexplainable moments — until he walked out of Sachsenhausen on April 22, 1945, the only Jew to survive the entire war in that single camp.

A book must be written to tell the full scope of this story. But one pivotal moment is asking to be told today.

In my father’s own words, from a sworn statement dated February 16, 1955, submitted to the German government in New York:

“In June 1942 I had to unload a factory train coming from the clay pit together with the other prisoners. At that time, my body was already in such a decrepit state that I only weighed 39 kg and was considered a ‘Muselmanner’… The train we had to unload consisted of many ‘Loris’ and was very long; for this reason I tried to pass between two of them because walking was very hard for me. The train started to move at that very moment and my right foot got under the wheels. My leg was injured so badly that the camp physician, an ‘Unterscharfufrer’, described it as: ‘this is not a broken leg, but a bone salad.’

I spent 4½ months in the first infirmary of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Then I could walk slowly on crutches and was transferred to the third sick prisoners’ ward. I still had to stay there until the middle of 1943, and was then sent to the convalescence barracks for about two months.”

The immediate and glaringly obvious question anyone reading these words must ask is: why was he not shot on the spot?

Every book we have read, every film we have seen, every story we have heard — that is exactly what happens next. If you could work, you were kept. If you were useless, you were discarded.

When I repeatedly asked my father this, he would look at me with his warm, blooming smile, a twinkle in his blue eyes, reaching out to touch me with his soft hand, and say simply: “I had to be born.”

Perhaps it was his way of saying that God saved him so that he would go forth and bring future generations into the world.

At that time my father was part of a work detail at Klinkerwerks — a private brick-making facility adjacent to the camp that used inmates as free labor to produce the bricks repaving Berlin as the capital of the Third Reich. Each month approximately 100 young men were selected for this notorious assignment. Each month they all died, replaced by another hundred.

When my father was one of perhaps ten men remaining, he knew he was close to death.

But he also understood something extraordinary. He understood that even within the concentration camps, a parallel universe of German regulations existed — that industrialists were required to comply with certain laws, and that if an injury was determined to be a workplace accident, the private enterprise would bear responsibility. While you could be shot for not working, if you were injured on the job, you could be relieved of duty.

He knew something else too. Sachsenhausen had originally been built as a prisoner of war camp during World War I, giving it a solid infrastructure — including a showcase infirmary with real beds, regularly inspected by the Red Cross.

And so, in the miasma of Klinkerwerks, weighing just 85 pounds, literally starving and working to death, my father made a calculation that defies imagination. If he could stage an accident. And survive it. And secure a Red Cross bed. There was a minuscule chance he might live.

He had nothing left to lose.

In hushed tones in our Northeast Philadelphia home in the 1960s and 70s, we knew fragments of this story — my father careful, likely fearing the pittance of German government compensation might be revoked if the truth emerged. It was only much later, in interviews with the Shoah Foundation, that he revealed what he had done.

He had very intentionally made it appear that he tripped. In reality he collapsed himself deliberately between two lorry cars. He stretched his right foot across the train track — calculating that if the first wheel passed over his leg the bone would shatter, but if the second wheel followed, his leg would be severed entirely. With a strength impossible to conceive, tenaciously clinging to life and the expectation of a better tomorrow, he placed his leg across the track, heard the bone shatter and splinter — and pulled back his dangling leg before the second set of wheels rolled over.

Bone salad. By design. To survive.

While my father recuperated in the infirmary, an angel appeared — a Polish political prisoner who gave my father the shirt of a patient who had just died, bearing a non-Jewish prisoner number. This man knew the camp was being liquidated of all Jews that day. He protected my father with a dead man’s shirt and saved his life.

I had originally planned to be in Israel this week. When that fell through I arranged to join my Federation Women’s Mission to Europe — where today I would have walked the streets of Berlin and visited Sachsenhausen again.

Instead, God had other plans.

Four days ago I broke my foot on an ordinary walk on an uneven street. It is almost as if God was telling me: more important than walking the streets of my father’s past is taking steps to tell his story for posterity. That is my real mission this week.

My foot broke walking out of a bakery — buying bread the morning after Passover. My father, Paul Kampler — Pesach in Hebrew — broke his leg to save his life.

May the souls of all who perished and suffered be remembered. May we continue to tell their stories. May we never forget the chapters of our eternal existence.

And in my father’s memory — may I never take a single moment of my own life for granted.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)