In the Auschwitz barracks where starving, emaciated, dying men were crammed into a bed by six, Werner Reich’s closest neighbor was a friendly German-Jewish man in his thirties named Herbert Levin, who before World War II was known as Nivelli the wizard.
One day in early 1944, Mr. Reich, then 16, returned to the barracks from a work assignment, climbed to the top of his bunk, and watched Mr. Levin shuffle the dirty deck of cards that prison guards had given him. that he could receive them – a little protection against being sent to the gas chamber of the death camp.
“And I couldn’t understand, you know — having a deck of cards in Auschwitz was like finding a gorilla in your bathroom,” Mr. Reich recalled in a TEDx Talk in 2020. “And then Mr. Levin turned turned to me and offered me the deck and said, “Pick a card.” So I picked up a card and he performed a card trick for me.”
To a teenager who had never seen a card trick, he said it was a “miracle.”
Mr. Levin explained the trick, and Mr. Reich repeated the instructions in his head for the rest of his time in Auschwitz – a distraction that helped him survive the horrors – then through a 35-mile death march in snow and ice on the to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Only after he was freed and made his way to England several years later did he buy a pack of cards and perform the magic on his own.
“And it worked,” he said. “It worked beautifully.”
Mr. Reich, who became an engineer after immigrating to the United States, never lost his love for magic, performing close-up tricks with cards and coins for small groups of other magicians, at temples and at his sons’ birthday parties.
He died July 8 at his home in Smithtown, NY, on Long Island, his son David said. He was 94.
Werner Reich was born in Berlin on October 1, 1927. His mother, Elly (Dux) Reich, was awarded the Iron Cross for her work as a nurse for Germany on the Eastern Front in World War I. His father, Wilhelm, was an engineer.
The comfortable life of the Reich was destroyed in 1933 when the Nazis came to power and Wilhelm Reich was forced to quit his job as an engineer because he was Jewish. They fled to Yugoslavia, where Mr. Reich died of natural causes in Zagreb in 1940.
When the Nazis invaded the country in 1941, Werner’s mother sent him and his sister, Renate, to different families. Werner lived with a couple who were part of the resistance movement for about two years until Gestapo agents arrested him.
Thus began his life as a prisoner, including at a police station in Graz, Austria, where he looked out a window and saw his mother in the prison courtyard. It was the last time he saw her before she was supposedly killed.
At Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic, one of his tasks was to eradicate pests with the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon B, which the Germans used in gas chambers. In Auschwitz, when he and other inmates ran naked past Doctor Josef Mengele, who would decide who was fit to work and who went to the gas chambers, they tried to appear robust enough to avoid being selected for death.
“We ran for our lives,” Mr. Reich told DailyExpertNews in 2017 for a profile on him. “We tried to look bigger and stronger. We would smile, do anything under the sun to look for work.”
He survived Auschwitz, the death march in frigid conditions (frostbite resulted in the amputation of parts of the toes of his right foot), and a final few months of captivity in Mauthausen before US Army troops liberated the camp on May 5, 1945.
He was 17. He weighed 64 pounds.
Mr. Reich returned to Yugoslavia and after two years fled to England, where he became a tool and die maker and met his future wife, Eva Schiff. She was one of 669 Czech children, mostly Jews, who were rescued before the outbreak of World War II in 1939 by Sir Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker, who used bribes, forgery and secret contacts with the Gestapo to get the children to Britain. to be brought by train and boat.
He and Miss Schiff were married in England and emigrated to the United States in 1955. After earning a bachelor’s degree from City College in New York, he worked as an engineer at Nabisco and the Hills supermarket chain.
Over the past 25 years, Mr. Reich spoke to schools, synagogues and other groups about his Holocaust experience. He gave an anti-bullying message to students.
“He said good people did nothing, be it a friend or a country,” David Reich said of his father in a telephone interview. “He said if you see someone being bullied, you should stand up for them. Do something.”
In addition to David, Mr. Reich leaves behind a son, Mikal, and four grandchildren. His wife died in 2016. His sister, Renate Romano, survived the Holocaust, immigrated to the United States in 1948, and died in 1999.
Mr. Levin’s card trick stayed with Mr. Reich for the rest of his life.
“We loved anything that could take us out of Auschwitz for even a moment, that could distract our minds from our memories and the horror around us,” he said in the 2017 interview.
In England he immersed himself in magic. He bought a pack of cards, then some magic tricks and books, and more tricks and books.
“There’s a very, very fine line between a hobby and madness,” he joked during his TEDx Talk.
Mr. Reich never saw Mr. Levin again after Auschwitz and was unaware that he had also immigrated to the United States, resumed his magical career and lived in Rego Park, Queens.
Mr. Levin died in 1977, but Mr. Reich did not learn of the death until nearly 30 years later, when he read an article in The Linking Ring, the monthly magazine of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, to which Mr. Reich belonged.
Reverend William V. Rauscher, a retired Episcopal rector and magician, wrote the article and later collaborated with Mr. Reich on his autobiography, “The Death Camp Magicians” (2015), which also told Mr. Levin’s story.
“He was a pretty good magician,” Mr. Rauscher said in a telephone interview about Mr. Reich. “He would visit me, pull out some cards and coins, and do tricks on the coffee table.” He added: “Other magicians found him fascinating because of his connection to Nivelli.”
mr. Reich forgot Mr. Levin never, nor the gift of a simple card trick that gave a frightened boy a momentary escape and a touch of humanity.
“It’s not the value or size of a gift that really matters,” said Mr. Reich in the TEDx Talk. “That’s how you keep it in your heart.”
