Sami Steigmann was 31 years old and living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when his parents came from Israel to visit him in 1971.

“They went outside for a little walk,” Steigmann recalled. “When they came back they saw me on the floor almost unable to move.”

Steigmann writhed in pain, pain he had kept a secret from his parents as his generation was taught not to cry in fear of appearing weak.

“I was able to hide that pain from my parents,” he said. “My father never knew it. In shock, he mentioned to me that I was subjected to medical experiments as a baby.”

Those experiments came at the hands of Nazis while Steigmann and his parents were kept at a labor camp during the Holocaust.

An estimated 245,000 Holocaust survivors are still alive today, with 38,000 of them living in the United States.

Steigmann, 84, is among them. For the last 16 years, he has traveled the country to speak about the killing of six million Jews by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, including 40 of Steigmann’s relatives.

He does so in hopes to prevent something similar from happening again.

Steigmann’s next stop is Lancaster County, when he will be the guest speaker for the Military Oral History Club of Lancaster County’s monthly gathering at Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2435, 401 Manor St., Columbia Borough, at 7 p.m. Tuesday. The event is open to the public.

“The reason we have to talk about the Holocaust forever and ever is because the Holocaust is the best example of what hate can do to a person, to a group of people, to a nation and to the world,” Steigmann said in a recent interview with LNP | LancasterOnline.

‘It can be excruciating’

Steigmann was born Dec. 21, 1939, in Czernovitz, Bukovina, a region now split between Romania and Ukraine.

Eighteen months later, German and Romanian armies entered the town. Several thousand Jews were killed over the coming months. Other Jews, including Steigmann and his parents, were sent to a labor camp in Mogilev-Podolsky, located in Transnistria, which today is a pro-Russian breakaway region on the western border of Ukraine.

Of the 44,000 concentration or incarceration camps during the Holocaust, more than 150 of them were in Transnistria. Prisoners were murdered not through systemic extermination, but rather through starvation, exposure to the elements and disease.

Steigmann was dying of starvation but survived thanks to a German woman who supplied food to the guards on a nearby farm.

“She gave me milk,” Steigmann said. “That’s what my father told me. I don’t try to embellish it or make it more than it was. That’s what I know. I don’t know the woman who saved my life.”

The labor camp was liberated by the Soviet Army in 1944, and the Steigmanns moved to the Transylvania region of Romania.

Steigmann still experiences headaches or pain in his head, neck or back, stemming from whatever was inflicted upon him during those medical experiments.

“Every single day,” he said. “ It can be excruciating, or it can be mild.”

Given his age at the time of the Holocaust, Steigmann has no direct memories of his experiences in the labor camp, and does not know exactly what kind of medical experiments were done to him.

“For me it’s a blessing in disguise because I don’t have to relive those memories like the older Holocaust survivors do,” he said.

It’s largely why Steigmann kept quiet about the Holocaust for much of his life.

That changed in 2008, when he was invited to a gathering of Holocaust survivors at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. It’s there he met a man who was from his hometown, deported to the same labor camp, spent the same stretch of time there (1941 to 1944) and was around the same age as Steigmann.

“That prompted me to stop ignoring that I’m a Holocaust survivor,” he said.

It also prompted him to become a member of the Holocaust Museum, which in turn assigned him a speaking engagement to a group of sixth-graders.

“When I saw the impact I’d had with such young people I realized, ‘Boy, I have something to share,’” he said. “I decided to dedicate the rest of my life to reach as many people as I can.”

‘Educate the next generation’

In 1961, the Steigmann family emigrated to Israel, where Steigmann served in the Israeli Air Force, not as a pilot. In 1968, Steigmann came to the United States, living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he married and later divorced, prompting his return to Israel. In 1988, he came back to the United States for good, choosing Manhattan, New York, as his final home. For a stretch in 1996, he was homeless.

“I got involved with the wrong people,” he recalled. “I lived in a shelter for homeless people.”

Steigmann lives on $1,563 a month from Social Security, plus $1,800 he gets every three months from the German government through the Claims Conference, which administers direct payment to eligible victims of Nazi persecution.

He turns down any compensation for his speaking engagements, just as he’s doing in his upcoming stop in Lancaster.

“He will go anywhere, anyplace, anytime in front of anybody,” Bev Barbe said. “All he requires is transportation, accommodation and food.”

Barbe is the speaker coordinator for the Military Oral History Club of Lancaster County. She said the club will gather money to reimburse Steigmann on transportation and food costs, and that Homewood Suites by Hilton in Manheim Township is letting Steigmann stay overnight free of charge.

“I’m not looking for accolades,” Steigmann said.

He estimates he has spoken to more than 250,000 people since 2008.

“My mission in life is to educate the next generation (about the Holocaust),” he said.

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