It is so difficult for this Grandma to watch the evening news. The world in which we live is a scary place and when the world becomes scary, we must worry about those who use such a world as a reason to hate and cause harm to others. Anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise around the world. There are attacks against minority groups around the world on the rise.
That makes remembering one of the worst genocides in the history of mankind ever more important. It is important that this Grandma, a child of Holocaust survivors, share some of the stories with you, my grandchildren, great grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, as you are third generation survivors.
Sunday, April 12, 2015 is Holocaust Remembrance Day and is celebrated around the world to remember the more than six million Jews who perished at the hand of the Nazis. This year will mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps.
This Grandma’s mother, GG (great –grandmother), spoke of surviving five selections at five concentration camps, “work camps.” She was a teenager. She told how she would listen carefully while she was on line during the selection process after arriving at a work camp. GG said she would watch how the elderly and ill were sent in one direction, and those of worker age would go in another. She listened to the age the Nazis wanted, the skills the Nazis wanted, and while waiting on line, she said she memorized a new birth date, simple skills she heard, so she too would survive the selection. She said once she said she was a welder! GG said she could never remember her actual birth date because she memorized so hard to survive. GG said that her father, a Rabbi who studied Kabbalah (and taught her some even though she was a girl in Europe which was forbidden at the time), told her she would be the only survivor in her village, and she was.
GG then said that, in the work camps, after the selection process, the brutality would start. She said the Nazis let dogs loose to attack the Jews and do other horrible things to scare the Jews. GG said she watched carefully to see if any of the guards flinched. If she saw a guard who seemed disturbed by the brutality in the slightest, she said she inched her way over near that guard, to ultimately be part of his worker group. GG said within days, she would whisper to the guard to look away, or something like that, and she would run away into the woods again and again, eating bark to survive, trying to find a partisan group to join to fight the Nazis.
GG was terrified of dogs her whole life. GG said she survived five work camps. GG said she survived the selection process five times. GG said she escaped five times. No one believed her, she said. It seemed an impossible feat. And, no one believed there were so many work camps that GG could have been in five such work camps herself.
Now we know better. Through the research done by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. we are learning more about the Nazi era. The museum has documented that the Nazis established 980 concentration camps; 1, 150 Jewish ghettos; 1,000 prisoner of war camps; 500 brothels were women were used as sex slaves, and many other work camps, a total of 42, 500 camps in all!
This Passover, the only survivor still alive in our family, GA (great-aunt), told me how our other aunt, great-grandfather’s sister, survived Auschwitz. I knew that she was rescued and fled to Sweden, but I did not know that she was naked in a gas chamber when the door would not shut, so she was pulled out by a Nazi moments before she was to be gassed. GA, who told me this about great-grandfather’s sister, survived by hiding with a farmer and his family, and her husband, great-grandfather’s brother, survived by joining the Russian army at age 17. GA said our aunt was lucky to have been pulled out of the gas chamber just before she was to be gassed.
So was great-grandfather, also a Holocaust survivor. He used the words that he was lucky too. He was a Warsaw ghetto fighter captured and taking to Treblinka three weeks before the uprising. Treblinka was a death camp and he too was on line naked, ready to go into the gas chamber, when a worker identified him as his brother (he was a best friend), and saved his life. My father said he carried his dead wife’s body out of the gas chamber. He said he was about to give up after three weeks of torture and broken bones, but his friend told him to hang on a little more. His friend was a leader of the uprising, and when the uprising began, gave my father guns and gold and diamonds and told him to grab others and run. His friend was killed. Great-grandfather and his group survived and joined a partisan group in the woods.
My beloved grandchildren, that is how your great-grandparents met.–in the woods in Poland—and they fought their way west into Germany to be where the Americans were fighting the Nazis and liberating concentration camps. They married in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany and intended to go fight in Palestine according to their displaced persons documentation. How do I know this? Because of documentation I received from the Holocaust Museum. I still cannot open all of the documents which you, grandchildren, can find in a folder on our computer entitled Holocaust, after my death. I did see actual documentation of the fact that after I was born in Germany, your great-grandparents changed their destination to America. I cannot help but think that they wanted me to be safe.
Safety has always been a concern in our family, with our history. Your great-grandparents said that fleeing east to the Russians also meant death, as the Russians were then also killing Jews. Killing and attacks on Jews continue to this day. This Grandma will never understand.
Just remember. Just work so it never happens again—for anyone in this world. As third generation survivors, it is your duty to keep Holocaust Remembrance Day alive for the generations to come.
With little Joy,
Mema
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