6 YEARS IN HELL

From the Holocaust to helping to hang Nazis

By ELISSA CHUDWIN

Jack Repp watched the hangings of every Nazi he helped convict with the U.S. Secret Service. Before they were hung, Repp took the rope from the executioner’s hands. He never yanked it, but he wanted to make an impression. He wanted his voice to be one of the last they heard.

“You know what that message was?” Repp says. “ ‘I don’t know how you could be out all day long, commit the atrocities you have committed, and then go home, touch your wife or touch your kids and use the words ‘I love you.’ ”

The 93-year-old Preston Hollow resident remembers the details of the tribunals, from the expensive suits the Nazis wore to how they wept during sentencing.

“I didn’t have tears in my eyes,” he says. “They took my parents away, my brothers away. I didn’t cry.”

Repp is grateful his mind never failed him, even in the moments his body was on the verge of collapse. Hitler took his family and his home, Repp says, but he couldn’t take his brain.

“I went through plenty of hell, and I was tickled to death to survive,” he says.

In 1939, the Germans invaded his hometown of Radom, Poland, where Repp lived with his four brothers, his sister and parents. The Germans ordered every Jewish family to move into a ghetto when he was roughly 15 years old.

He returned from school one day to an abandoned house. He never saw his parents and brothers again. It was only when World War II ended that he learned his sister was the only other family member to survive.

In Radom, Repp worked in an ammunition factory and lived in a slave labor camp-turned-concentration camp. He escaped the gas chambers during selection. Standing in line, he told the German officers he already was 18 and could work.

It wasn’t the first time Repp avoided death. He survived unrelenting death marches to camp after camp.

The conditions were dismal. Everyone was dirty and infested with lice. Starving, he ate potato or apple peels he found in the sewer to survive.

“I never complained I’m hungry,” he says. “You know why? If you’re going to complain, it’s going to help you die.”

Six years had passed before men wearing U.S. Army uniforms and Red Cross trucks arrived at Dachau. It was 1945. Repp was 21 years old and weighed 69 pounds. Toothless, malnourished and infected with typhus, he could barely stand. Finally free, his safety was short-lived. He was living in a displaced-persons camp when the U.S. Secret Service asked him to wear a Nazi uniform and impersonate a German soldier to help bring them to trial.

Repp stepped up to the challenge, risking his life for another four years to bring justice for the millions of lost lives.

“I felt stronger than you can imagine,” he says. “If you live that type of life, you have to be strong.”

Repp felt obligated to assist the Secret Service, much like he believes it’s his responsibility to talk about the Holocaust. He speaks to visitors at the Dallas Holocaust Museum and Center for Education and Tolerance weekly, even though he