It was a beautiful Saturday during Memorial Day weekend at Laura’s Park in Pueblo, Colorado. It was breezy, but the sun was warm. Colorado was still in the midst of spring, not yet summer.

Fallen FBI Special Agent Laura Schwartzenberger grew up in Pueblo. She played in what used to be called Starlite Park, and she met her husband, Jason Baca, in their shared hometown.

Her FBI career took her to Albuquerque and then Miami. But Pueblo was home, and many of her friends and family still live in the area.

Employees at FBI Los Angeles and throughout the Bureau learned living history from Holocaust survivor Joe Alexander. Joe is 101 years old and survived being in 12 concentration camps in Poland and Germany during World War II.

He spoke eloquently and with a clear, even pace as the crowd in Los Angeles listened intently, some fighting back tears during his April 17 visit, which was also webcast via FBITV. 

Joe described the horrific details of being inside the Warsaw Ghetto in his youth and shared the moment when he saw the members of his family for the very last time. He endured imprisonment in 12 concentration camps, from Dachau to Auschwitz to Birkenau among others. 

He spoke about being roused by the guards only to watch three victims be hanged, presumably for not being strong or fast enough to carry out their forced labor. 

For more than 30 minutes, Joe told his story without interruption. He talked about how he and his family lived a “very good life” until 1939 when the Nazis invaded and split Poland into two; half for the Third Reich and half was still Poland but under German occupation. The Alexander family lived in the area the Third Reich controlled. The Nazis took his uncle away from the town square where the Alexander family lived until Joe was 16 years old.

Eventually, Joe and many other Jews were forced to live in the Warsaw Ghetto, a walled-off and cramped area with over 400,000 people living in squalor, where it was common to see dead bodies strewn along the street. After five months in the ghetto, his parents learned their hometown of Kowal was safe and bribed guards so that Joe, a sister and a brother could return there. Several days later, all Jewish men from ages 16 to 60 were told to report to a schoolhouse.

Joe soon found himself at the first concentration camp where he and his fellow Jews were forced to do hard labor under extremely poor conditions and with barely any food. He built dams, laid cobblestones, built roofs and an airport and laid railroad tracks, among other menial tasks. During these trials, he became very ill on more than one occasion and noted matter-of-factly that during this time, “people died every day.” 

In response to an employee’s question, Joe said that it never occurred to him to have the tattoo removed because it’s a daily reminder of what he endured and what happened to his family. The tattoo helps him tell his story so that he can speak for “the 6 million who cannot talk.”   

He walked to another camp — Birkenau — where he was imprisoned for six months and saw Mengele two more times at a distance. In Birkenau, Joe saw men being beaten to death or who ran into electric fences because they “couldn’t take it anymore,” he said. 

After the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, Joe returned to the area to help clean it up and stack bricks 8- to 10-feet high. There were no facilities or sanitation, and typhus broke out in the ghetto.

He never knew anyone who went to the hospital and came out alive, so he crouched behind the bricks for several days with a high fever when an indifferent Nazi was in charge and recovered. He later found himself marching, then on a train to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. Joe saw female prisoners for the first time at Dachau. He worked in a kitchen that cooked for German guards outside Dachau and smuggled food for his fellow prisoners.  

In late April 1945, while in Dachau, Joe and his fellow prisoners were told they were going on a “death march” into the mountains. They walked for days but could hear fighting in the distance and sensed that American troops weren’t far behind. While in the forest, Joe ate some cooked horsemeat and said it was the best meal he’d had in years.

The next day, Joe and his fellow prisoners were brought to a nearby town and were finally liberated by American troops. He and others were directed to an underground bunker, a large warehouse, and were given food, clothing and bicycles, and then stayed temporarily in a displaced persons (DP) camp. Soon he found himself in Munich and knew he was free. 

For months, Joe went from DP camp to DP camp to look for family members — his parents, two sisters and a brother — whom he hadn’t seen since the Warsaw Ghetto. “To this day, I don’t know what happened to them,” he told the somber crowd.

Joe reunited with a cousin in Poland and later lived in Germany where he stayed because he didn’t have a passport. Ultimately, he was sponsored by a Jewish organization and registered in Munich to go to America. Joe was examined by a doctor and, while it was unclear if he was joking, he said he also had to “get checked out by the FBI.” That comment elicited a chuckle from the audience.

Joe arrived by boat to New York on May 30, 1949, and was sent by his sponsor to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He worked for a tailor whom he described affectionately, saying wistfully, “a father couldn’t be better than he was to me.”  Joe stayed for six months and moved in 1950 to Santa Monica, California, where his cousin had relocated. 

During the Korean War, Joe worked as a tailor in Victorville, California, and stayed for seven years near a military installation. Later, he moved back to Los Angeles and opened his own store on Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles Uniform Exchange. His store, where he sold military uniforms to television and movie studios, was just down the street from Paramount Studios. Joe married and had two children. He ran the store for 37 years before he retired. 

Reflecting on his ordeal, Joe said that he was determined to survive. “I never lost faith, never stopped believing in God. I may have a bad day today, but tomorrow will be a better day.” 

When asked if he would recommend a movie about the Holocaust, Joe said his favorite depiction is “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” He also recommended the book, “Night,” written by fellow survivor Elie Weisel, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. 

In early May, the FBI joined with the MovementForward non-profit organization to help train law enforcement officers and community leaders on developing effective outreach programs. The Professionalizing Law Enforcement Community Engagement Training (PLECET) Conference, sponsored by MovementForward in Atlanta, brought together 1,700 outreach professionals to share best practices, look at innovations in the field, and build support networks across the country.

Robert Contee, assistant director of the FBI’s Office of Partner Engagement, served as one of several panelists during a keynote discussion on how law enforcement agencies can better connect with people of all backgrounds.

“Optimal community safety is achieved through collaborative efforts, where local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies work alongside community members, jointly striving towards the common goal of fostering safer communities,” said AD Contee.

In addition, the FBI’s outreach professionals led a workshop on building connections with vulnerable communities through accountability, acknowledgment, and authenticity. “For quite some time, many agencies–including the FBI–have focused their outreach program efforts in traditional ways such as with academies and feel good events,” said Ken Hoffman, unit chief of the FBI’s community relations program. “There will always be a role for those programs, but we are working to flip the focus to emphasize the importance of relationships first. This conference was an opportunity to share our work with a large audience.”

Both at FBIHQ and with our community outreach specialists in the FBI’s 56 field offices, we are emphasizing the need to take accountability for both the Bureau’s history and how our experiences shape our personal perceptions. We also must acknowledge the hard work ahead as we build trust with communities that carry trauma or are distrustful of government and law enforcement. Finally, we strive to act each day with authenticity in word and action. Only with authenticity can we all develop empathy for each other with the intent of healing the difficulties that divide us.

If you would like to learn more about the FBI’s community outreach program, please visit our webpage at www.fbi.gov/outreach.