Joseph Matzner, 83; survived 5 concentration camps

As he grew from a teenager to a young adult inside Nazi concentration camps, Joseph M. Matzner witnessed some of history's worst atrocities.

"To be honest with you, sometimes I say to myself, when I tell the story, 'Am I dreaming or is this reality?' But it gets verified by other people," he told the Globe in November 2003.

Spared from death, Mr. Matzner spent the next six decades embracing life. He loved food, adventure, lively political debates, and most of all people.

"You can use the word victim or survivor -- he was definitely a survivor," said his daughter, Karen Chinca of Brookline. "Through healing, he told his story and it was not all negative, negative. He was a true survivor. He had his tattoo removed because he wanted to go forward; he didn't want anybody to pity him."

His health failing, Mr. Matzner died Monday in Danvers, his family said. He was 83 and had homes in Boston and Rockport after living in Andover for many years.

Mr. Matzner's family said he often told people: "Surviving the Holocaust did not make me a hero. It was luck, that's all."

Born in a village near Krakow, Poland, he was a teenager as the Holocaust began to unfold. His father was shot in the street after being taken from the family's home. His mother died in the gas chambers.

Not until after the end of World War II did he learn that most of his family died, though his sister Lola Frankel survived and now lives in Yonkers, N.Y.

Mr. Matzner lived through stays in five concentration camps, among them Auschwitz, Dachau, and Muhldorf.

"One thing I remember about Auschwitz is the smell of smoke from the burning bodies," he told the Globe two years ago of his time working as a roofer on houses where the guards lived. "On days when the wind was blowing from Birkenau, you could smell the burning bodies. They were burning tens of thousands a day."

In a 2001 interview for an educational video produced by the Holocaust Center Boston North, Mr. Matzner said: "We could do nothing but wait and wonder if we were next. Life seemed hopeless."

One evening, he climbed out the window of a latrine and fell in with prisoners who were returning from a screening process held each night. Anyone deemed too unhealthy to work was sent to the gas chamber. Mr. Matzner, who had been injured when a guard kicked him in the leg, said he was sure he would have faced death had he not slipped in with those who had already been examined.

Days before the camps were liberated, the Nazis gathered nearly 60,000 prisoners for a final death march into Germany, trying to stay ahead of the advancing Soviet army. Mr. Matzner was among them and was not freed until the end of April 1945.

"I was so thin that you could see every rib in my chest," he told the Globe in 2005.

Once liberated, Mr. Matzner traveled back to Poland in search of family members, then returned to Germany, where he was trained in electronics. He moved to the United States in 1951, living first in New York City and marrying in 1961.

His wife, Alexandra, is also from Poland, but had immigrated to Canada. They met in Toronto and moved to Lowell, where Mr. Matzner worked for Pellon Corp., a textile manufacturer. They moved to Andover after a few years. He retired in 1987.

Along with volunteering and lecturing for Facing History and Ourselves, a Brookline-based educational organization with a focus on the Holocaust, Mr. Matzner found that adventure beckoned during retirement.

"He was not a rule guy," Chinca, his daughter said. "Somebody would tell him not to do something and trust me, he would do it."

From bungee jumping near Rio de Janeiro to ballooning over the Serengeti in Africa to sailing his cape dory off Rockport and Gloucester, Mr. Matzner was anything but sedate.

"There was one experience in Africa," Chinca said. "They told him, 'Don't get too close to the elephants,' and he did and he was chased by the elephants."

He spoke often at public gatherings about his experiences in the Holocaust and was devoted to his two grandsons, Enio and Raphael, for whom he liked to cook "his famous couscous," his daughter said.

"All of my friends adored my Dad," she said. "He would come to parties I would have and would bring his famous shrimp cocktails or his avocado and shrimp dish. He really loved food. He didn't want anybody telling him 'healthy, unhealthy,' he was going was going to eat it."

Mr. Matzner, she said, "really saw the good in life. Emotionally he was very strong and he saw the good in people. He was really a compassionate human being."

A graveside service will be held at 1 p.m. today in Temple Emanuel Cemetery in Lawrence, followed by a memorial observance at his daughter's home in Brookline.