Wearing aprons, he and other prisoners at the concentration camp would take ashes from a giant ditch, and spread them over the fields where they toiled to the point of starvation. Some of the remains were not completely burned.
"I was holding bones and I thought 'my father, my mother,' " Hollender, 81, recalled in a recent interview. "It was horrible."
Sixty-two years after the horrors of Auschwitz, Hollender had the chance to, literally, bury that part of his past. At a small ceremony in Beth Israel Memorial Park yesterday, he laid to rest a box filled with soil from Auschwitz.
About 40 congregants of Temple Beth Israel gathered, umbrellas in hand to deflect the morning rains, and offered Jewish prayers of mourning before Hollender hunched over a small hole in the ground. He picked up a few handfuls of dirt, placed them in the hole, and gingerly wiped his hands clean.
"It's a day when we are all coming together to put closure to an atrocity that happened so many years ago," said Arthur Marion, 67, a friend of Hollender's and a Waltham native.
Hollender and his wife Edith, 80, and also an Auschwitz survivor, returned to the site of the infamous concentration camp in Poland in 2000 for their 50th anniversary. Standing over one of the large ditches where human remains had once been disposed of, Hollender said he had the sudden urge to take something with him. He asked Edith for a plastic bag, descended the ditch and brought some soil home.
"They are the ashes of our ancestors," he said.
Hollender had originally planned to have the soil buried with him and Edith when they passed, but when congregants were discussing Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day, he decided the time was right to lay it to rest.
He put the soil in a box wrapped in white paper, and at Edith's urging, he placed a yellow Jewish Star of David on the box, like the ones Jews in Nazi Europe were forced to wear in public.
In an interview Saturday in the small library at Temple Beth Israel, Hollender recounted living through the Nazi terror, his struggle to recover after the liberation, and his eventual arrival in the United States. Sitting at a long conference table in the narrow room, Edith at his side, Hollender spoke about his traumatic experiences.
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1926, his entire family was taken by the Nazis in 1944, later than most of the regime's victims. Of his parents, two sisters and two brothers, only he and one sister, Serena, who now lives in Florida, survived. They were taken to Auschwitz on cattle wagons, with little to eat or drink.
"Of course, we youngsters didn't know what was happening." Hollender said.
He knew soon enough, as he was put to work in the Auschwitz fields. One day, he said, an officer took off a prisoner's hat and tossed it away. When the prisoner turned to retrieve it, the officer shot him in the back.
"It was entertainment for them," he said, his eyes welling up.
Another time, as he was plowing the field, an officer stabbed his lower back with a pitchfork, he said. And as the Allied forces bombarded the areas near Auschwitz late in the war, Hollender and those around looked up at the sky.
"We were praying they should drop a bomb on us, because our lives were already lost," he said. "There was no hope that we would survive."
As the Russians closed in on Auschwitz in early 1945, Hollender and other prisoners were put on transports and moved from Poland.
Hollender was in Ebensee concentration camp in Austria when the war ended.
When he was liberated by U.S. troops in May 1945, he had lost weight, was suffering from tuberculosis and had holes in both of his lungs. After the Nazi officer stabbed him in the back, infection spread to his spine, leaving his body numb and immobilizing him in a body cast for two years.
Liberated from the concentration camp, Hollender returned to his native Czechoslovakia.
In and out of hospitals for five years, he would marry Edith, and work as a store manager. It would be years before he felt strong enough to emigrate.
It wasn't until 1967 the Hollenders came to the United States and he worked mostly in electronics before he retired.
"Thank God, we still had the chance to make a living here, and not to be a burden on anyone," he said.
As the rain poured and things seemed to come full circle yesterday morning, Marsha Stone, 59, a congregant, struggled to hold back tears as she talked about the Hollenders.
"It's just very emotional," she said, turning away. "They're just amazing people."
