This TED Talk features author, magician, and Holocaust survivor Werner Reich, recorded live at TEDx Mid-Atlantic 2019.

In the rather delightful book, The Little Prince, there is a quotation which says it's only with the heart that one can see rightly.

What is essential is invisible.

And while the author wrote these words sitting in a comfortable chair somewhere in the United States, I learned this very same lesson, miles away in a filthy, dirty

barrack in an extermination camp in Poland.

It isn't the value or the size of a gift that truly matters.

It is how you hold it in your heart.

When I was six years old, my mother, my father, my sister and myself left Jew-hating Germany,

and we went to Yugoslavia. And we were in Yugoslavia for seven happy years, and then Germany

invaded Yugoslavia, and we suddenly were persecuted again, and I had

to go into hiding. And I was hiding for roughly two years with a couple who worked for the

resistance movement, and I developed films, and I made enlargements.

One day, when I was 15 years old, I was arrested by the Gestapo and beaten up,

and for two months dragged through various prisons, and eventually I ended up in a old fortress, 150-year-old

fortress in Czechoslovakia, which the Nazis had converted into a concentration camp.

I was there for 10 months. I laid railroad tracks, I exterminated vermin, I made baskets.

And after 10 months, about 2,000 of us were loaded into cattle cars.

The doors were closed and we were shipped east.

For three days, we traveled like, and then we were unloaded.

We were smelling of urine and of feces,

and we found ourselves in the Auschwitz extermination camp,

a camp that by that time had murdered already over one million people

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