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  • In the rather delightful book "The Little Prince,"

  • there is a quotation, which says

  • "It's only with the heart that one can see rightly.

  • What is essential is invisible."

  • And while the author wrote these words sitting in a comfortable chair,

  • somewhere in the United States,

  • I learned this very same lesson

  • miles away in a filthy, dirty barrack

  • in an extermination camp in Poland.

  • It isn't the value or the size of a gift that truly matters,

  • it is how you hold it in your heart.

  • When I was six years old,

  • my mother, my father, my sister and myself

  • left Jew-hating Germany, and we went to Yugoslavia.

  • And we were in Yugoslavia for seven happy years,

  • and then Germany invaded Yugoslavia

  • and we suddenly were persecuted again,

  • and I had to go into hiding.

  • And I was hiding for roughly two years

  • with a couple who had worked for the resistance movement.

  • And I developed films, and I made enlargements.

  • One day, when I was 15 years old,

  • I was arrested by the gestapo

  • and beaten up,

  • and, for two months, dragged through various prisons,

  • and eventually, I ended up

  • in a 150-year-old fortress in Czechoslovakia,

  • which the Nazis had converted into a concentration camp.

  • I was there for 10 months.

  • I laid railroad tracks,

  • I exterminated vermin,

  • I made baskets,

  • and after 10 months,

  • about 2,000 of us were loaded into cattle cars,

  • the doors were closed, and we were shipped east.

  • For three days, we traveled like that,

  • and when we were unloaded,

  • we were smelling of urine and of faeces,

  • and we found ourselves in the Auschwitz extermination camp.

  • A camp that, by that time,

  • had murdered already over one million people

  • and sent them through the chimney into the sky.

  • We arrived, we were stripped of all of our properties,

  • whatever we had,

  • and were given striped uniforms,

  • were given a tattoo on our arms,

  • and we also were given the message

  • that we would be there for exactly six months.

  • And after that, we would leave the camp.

  • Through the chimney.

  • We were assigned to different barracks.

  • And the barracks were filled with wooden bunks,

  • six people on each level,

  • three people sleeping in one direction and three in the other direction,

  • so whichever way you slept,

  • you always had a pair of feet in your face.

  • The man next to me was an extremely nice gentleman,

  • and he introduced himself as Mr. Herbert Levine.

  • Mr. Levine was kind and polite to me.

  • One day, when I came back from a work assignment,

  • I climbed up,

  • I was at the top level of the three-tier bunk,

  • and there was Mr. Levine with a deck of cards.

  • And he was shuffling these cards.

  • And I couldn't understand it, you know,

  • having a deck of cards in Auschwitz

  • was like finding a gorilla in your bathroom.

  • (Laughter)

  • You know, "What is he doing there?"

  • And then Mr. Levine turned to me

  • and offered me the deck, and said, "Pick a card."

  • So I picked a card,

  • and he performed a card trick for me.

  • He performed a miracle.

  • And I'd never seen a card trick before,

  • and the man who performed it was sitting right there.

  • And then Mr. Levine did the unthinkable.

  • He actually explained the trick to me.

  • And the words got burned into my brain.

  • And I remembered every single word,

  • and from that day on,

  • I practiced that trick every day.

  • Although I didn't have any cards.

  • I just kept on practicing.

  • About three weeks later,

  • the entire camp, with the exception of a couple hundred of us,

  • were sent to the gas chambers.

  • I was sent to another camp where I worked in the stables,

  • and then, in January 1945,

  • when the Russians advanced,

  • 60,000 of us were sent on a death march.

  • And we walked for three days, on and off,

  • and in the middle of the winter,

  • and by the time we arrived at a railroad siding,

  • out of the 60,000 people,

  • 15,000 had died.

  • And the rest of us were loaded into open railroad cars,

  • and for four days, shipped all the way from Poland down to Austria.

  • And we found ourselves in a death camp,

  • in a concentration camp called Mauthausen,

  • which again was built like a fortress.

  • And at that point, the SS abandoned us,

  • and there was no food there,

  • and there were thousands and thousands of bodies there.

  • I slept for three days next to a dead man,

  • just to get his ration of a tablespoon of moldy bread.

  • And two days before the end of the war, May 5,

  • we were liberated by American forces.

  • At that time, I was 17 years old,

  • and I weighed 64 pounds.

  • And I hitchhiked back to Yugoslavia.

  • And when I came back to Yugoslavia,

  • there was communism there,

  • there was no family there

  • and there were no friends there.

  • I stayed there for two years,

  • and after two years, I managed to escape to England.

  • And when I came to England,

  • I couldn't speak English,

  • I had no education, I had no skills.

  • I started working,

  • and about a year after I arrived in England,

  • I bought myself a deck of cards.

  • And for the very first time,

  • I actually performed the trick

  • that was shown to me in Auschwitz on top of a bunk bed.

  • And it worked.

  • It worked beautifully.

  • And I showed it to some friends of mine,

  • and they loved it.

  • And I went to a magic store, and I bought some magic tricks,

  • and I showed them to my friends,

  • and I bought some more magic tricks

  • and I showed it to them.

  • And then I bought some magic books, and I bought some more magic books.

  • There's a very, very thin line

  • between a hobby and insanity.

  • (Laughter)

  • Anyway, I got married,

  • and I came to the United States,

  • and one of the first jobs that I had

  • demanded from me to speak to small groups of people.

  • And I managed it, I was very good at it.

  • And then, 25 years ago, I retired.

  • And I started speaking in schools.

  • And the only reason why I could speak in schools

  • is because a very friendly man

  • showed a rather scared kid a card trick

  • in a concentration camp.

  • This man who showed it to me, Mr. Levine,

  • had been a professional magician.

  • He worked in Germany,

  • and when he came to Auschwitz, the SS knew who he was,

  • so they gave him some cards,

  • they gave him a piece of string,

  • they gave him some dice,

  • and he performed for them.

  • And then he also taught some of them.

  • He survived the war,

  • but his wife and his son died.

  • He came to the United States and performed in various venues,

  • but I never met him again.

  • But the trick that he showed me stayed with me

  • and enabled me to go around schools

  • and try to make this world just a little bit better.

  • So if you ever know somebody who needs help,

  • if you know somebody who is scared,

  • be kind to them.

  • Give them advice,

  • give them a hug,

  • teach them a card trick.

  • Whatever you are going to do,

  • it's going to be hope for them.

  • And if you do it at the right time,

  • it will enter their heart,

  • and it will be with them wherever they go, forever.

  • Thank you.

  • (Applause)

In the rather delightful book "The Little Prince,"

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