LARAMIE - Exhausted by a grimy, two-day train trip to an unknown destination, the Jews were told to remember what hook they hung their clothes on. That way, they would be able to reclaim their own when they came back from the showers.

The guards who told them this knew that these people would never put their clothes back on. The destination was the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination and Selection Camp. The shower was a gas chamber. The seemingly considerate words were a bit of gratuitous cruelty in the horror of the Holocaust.

After the bodies were taken to the crematorium, the guards "would go home on leave, play with their little children, go to church and pray, and come back to continue the same evil over and over again," Holocaust survivor Jack Adler of Denver said Wednesday.

Adler, 76, was 10 years old in September 1939 when Nazi soldiers marched into Pabianice, Poland, where his family owned a textile business. Along with other Jews in the town, they were moved to a ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz, where they were held virtual prisoners. His mother and brother died there. In 1944, Adler and his father and two sisters were sent to Auschwitz/Birkenau. His sisters were killed. He and his father were later sent to a work camp at Kaufering, Germany.

Young Jack was later sent to the German concentration camp at Dachau. He was the only member of the family to survive the camps.

Speaking to a mostly student audience that jammed the University of Wyoming College of Agriculture auditorium, Adler said, "Adolf Hitler did not create anti-Semitism, nor did the Nazis. They were students of the anti-Semitism that had existed for many centuries."

Hate groups are still thriving in many parts of the world, he told the students, and "it is up to you to make sure they never succeed."

In his native Poland, he said, "the core of anti-Semitism survives," and he has "no desire to go back there" as long as it does.

His stories were not all about cruelty. At one camp, his chores included cleaning the commanding S.S. colonel's wood-burning stove daily. In the ashes, he said, he regularly found neatly wrapped bits of bread and bacon that he could share with his father.

"He wanted me to find that, or else he would have thrown it into the garbage," he said.

After he was beaten by a guard one day, he said, the commander, an S.S. officer, asked him to point out the guard who had done it. Despite his fear of reprisal, he did so, and the commander duly disciplined the guard.

"He was a decent human being who got caught up in something over his head, as I am sure were many other Germans," he said.

Adler's speech was the first of three planned this semester as part of the UW Graduate School's Distinguished Speaker Series.

Star-Tribune correspondent W. Dale Nelson can be reached at wdnelson@bresnan.net.