"While it would be easy to be angry, Phil was truly a gentle soul," said Jerry Weiner, a longtime Sioux City businessman
By EARL HORLYK/SIOUX CITY JOURNAL/TNSA visitor to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum walks past a mural of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Washington, January 26, 2007(photo credit: REUTERS/JIM YOUNG)
SIOUX CITY - For an entire decade, Philip L. Gans shared his harrowing story of surviving as a prisoner at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp with more than 25,000 Siouxland students during Tolerance Week observances held the first week in April between 2005 and 2015.Despite being the only member of his family on his father's side to survive the Holocaust, Gans was never filled with hate."While it would be easy to be angry, Phil was truly a gentle soul," said Jerry Weiner, a longtime Sioux City businessman who started the city's annual Tolerance Week with his wife, Kathy. "He was a great man but also a gentle soul."Gans died in Clearwater, Florida, on Sept. 27 at the age of 91.Born in Amsterdam, Holland, Gans lived there until he was taken by Nazis to Auschwitz from August 1943 to January 1945. He was later moved to the Flossenburg Concentration Camp in Bavaria, Germany, from January 1945 until April 1945, when he was liberated by the American Army."Phil was just a teenager when he was in the concentration camps," said Jenni Malsom, a now-retired Sioux City-based educator who befriended Gans. "That's something you never forget."Miraculously, Gans discovered his mother's only sister had escaped the Holocaust by moving to the Caribbean island of Aruba. He lived with this aunt in Aruba in 1946 before moving to the United States in 1950.After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, Gans spent the majority of his working life in the oil industry before retiring to Clearwater in 1986."Many Holocaust survivors wanted to forget their past," Weiner said. "Phil wanted it to be a lesson of what can happen when bad people are allowed to do bad things."Gans had been giving talks of surviving Auschwitz when he was introduced to Weiner at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.
