Gerda Weismann remembers when the war started. She heard shooting coming coming from the roof. Her family moved into the basement of their home to hide. There was no water, electricity, heating, or air conditioning. Her brother was forced into a labor camp shortly after the war started. Gerda says the worst day of her life was on June 28th 1942, it was the last day she saw her father. When she was taken to a concentration camp her and her mom were separated. She was on a truck leaving her mother and she jumped off. The soldiers put her back on the truck and told her she was too young to die. Gerda was taken to a slave labor camp where she got very sick. The woman who ran the camp saved Gerda’s life by making her work even though she was sick.…
Ruth feels unwelcomed and out of place when she returns to Vienna after the war. She says that, “The other survivors of my Viennese childhood irritate me like a powerful itch, and I prefer to avoid them” (p. 19). She does not associate Vienna with the alluring essence that tourists and post-Nazi residents describe.…
In Deborah Samson’s child and teenage years were rough because she lived in poverty. It didn’t make anything any better when her father left on a expedition at sea and never came back. She was taken from her mother and was in the care of her grandparents. When her grandparents passed away she moved in with a farmer living in Middleborough. She was only ten years old and was expected to work as an indentured…
Her mother had gotten away by saying that she was not Jewish, and escaped easy at this because most of the S.S blandly looked for dark olive eyes and hooked noses. Sarah had blond hair, and blue eyes. She got a job and it was pre-arranged that she would be a nurse’s assistant or a practical nurse in the nursing home. The Nazi’s were afraid of entering the Isolation ward as they were so selfishly, scared of getting sick from disease. Max had then found the family and was 12 years senior by the time they saw him again, also being married at a very early age. As they waited for her father, weeks went by until they found out that he had been exterminated in Auschwitz. In 1986, Jeannine moved to New Orleans in 1986. She was a mother with six children and she still had fantasies that her father was alive. Later on, still being 1986, there was a gathering of survivors in Philadelphia and a nice group from New Orleans went. Jeannine, her sister and her brother all attended, and the gathering took place in a big hall. There were mostly Polish survivors. Some were French. Most would state their ethnicity. The arrived a large table, where the Germans had meticulously recorded every Jewish citizen that was deported and every city in that country. Jeannine spotted her fathers name, and under it was when he was deported and when they were set free. Jeannine’s father had the listing of when he was…
The Huffington Post Magazine had an interview with the eighty two year old french Holocaust survivor. Cecile author of “ Goodbye For Always: The triumph of the Innocents”, had the chance to tell her stories the way she saw them unfold. Miss Widerman and her younger sister escaped from paris stadium and subsequently went into hiding in Normandy, France. Cecile was one of…
At 6 years old dropped baby brother, Zalman, and he died when 2 months old…
One of the hardest struggles occurred during the 1900. This struggle was none other than the holocaust. In this piece of writing you will learn of the hardships that a little 13 year old girl faced during hiding from the Nazi regime. This girl stayed with her family and another family as well in the little annex that had little to no room in general and for two families. The lack of food was another hardship since they had so many people and little food that they weren’t able to eat as much as they wanted, in addition, they ate small portions a day just imagine that not being able to eat as much as you want. In addition, one of the members of the other family was stealing food at night for himself and was making everyone…
Spring. 1944. Thousands of Jews in the small, Hungarian town of Sighet are being deported from their homes and are ripped from any normal lives they have. Starvation, captivity, and indiscriminate beatings are now a constant reality in the lives of Jews across the continent. Award-winning journalist, Ellie Wiesel, emphasizes in his memoir, Night; that although some Jews did survive, they ever truly return from the flames. In the coming months, the Jews will realize that they have devolved to the same level of dehumanization that they are faced with.…
The book Elli: Coming of Age in the Holocaust provides much information on what happened during this time. It is a biography by Livia E. Bitton Jackson. Livia Jackson was thirteen when she was taken to Auschwitz. After liberation, she completed high school in displaced person camps in Germany. In 1951, she traveled to the U.S. on a refugee ship and completed her higher education, later receiving a Ph.D. from N.Y.U. Since, she has taught at several colleges and became Professor of Judaic Studies at Herbert H. Lehman College of The City University of New York. She later married, and made her home in Israel, where she currently teaches at Tel Aviv University. This is her first book.…
During the late 1930’s the world was contaminated by the Second World War and the Holocaust. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Holocaust is defined as follows: “a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire.” During the Holocaust, the Nazis, under the command of Adolf Hitler, liquidated over six million Jews. There is one Jewish survivor whose story especially touched my heart and changed my attitude towards life for the better. This amazing woman is Krystyna Chiger. Krystyna and her family escaped the Nazi liquidation by living in sewers for fourteen months (qtd. in “The Girl in the Green Sweater” 5). Accordingly, thorough assessments of my personal experiences according to the life lessons of Krystyna Chiger descriptively visualize the Holocaust and its everlasting impact on society.…
I was sitting with my family at the breakfast table drinking milk and eating a piece of burnt toast; that was when I heard the feint sound of sirens coming from the east end of the block. My dads face grew pale and my mother quickly stood up and grabbed my brother and mines hand. She guided us towards the back of the house through a small opening in the floor. Once we reached the hole, she took my brothers hand and placed it in mine, telling him to watch over me. We were put into the hole and she kissed our heads, then covered the little light we had with a rug. I started to panic, unaware of the destruction and persecution that lay before me on a silver platter. We spent a week in that ditch, although it had felt like a lifetime. All the while, I thought of my parents: where had they gone; would they soon return? One day while we were there, with cramps building up in my legs, I heard footsteps coming from above my head. My brother hoping it was our parents returning to save us from the forever darkness that we faced slid the rug over and peered up with squinting eyes. The rough man standing above us, however, was not our father, but a man I would soon come to know as, Nazi soldier. The reasons of our taking were not because of crime, but because of my ethnicity, the way I looked, the way I spoke, and even my religion.…
true story. It tells of the experience of Blima Weisstuch, a Jewish girl in Poland, between the years 1936 and 1947. To a reader today, those words—Jews, 1940s, Poland—may not suggest anything particular. But to someone who lived through those years, the words evoke shudders of horror. For during that era, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party were rising to power in Europe. As Blima herself says, “[The Nazis] had some plan they talked about in these smoke-filled clubs, a plan for the country, the world. A plan which did not include Jews.” In order to understand the nightmare that overtook Blima and her family, some background information is helpful.…
This may be the most difficult speech I have ever written. Most of us are familiar with the famous photograph of a dead Syrian boy, who washed up on the shore of a Turkish beach after drowning as he family tried to escape the violence wrought by the Islamic State terrorist group, ISIS. Throughout this tragic crisis, countries from all over the world have been called forward as global citizens to help with what has been referred to as the worst humanitarian crisis of our generation. Canada being one of those countries, has promised to resettle 25,000 refugees by the end of year. Meaning within one months time we will have 25,000 more people in Canada. Those people are going to be given access to our resources, health care, and education.…
Born in October of 1923, Grese grew up in an ordinary, agricultural German family with four other siblings. As usual, she attended school with her siblings and helped with the household chores. In contrast, Grese’s adolescent years were not in her favor and marked a definite period of change. She was quite enthralled with the Nazi youth organization her father highly disapproved of, the League of German Girls . Later, her mother reportedly committed suicide by drinking hydrochloric acid in 1936 due an affair committed by her father. Two years later, in 1938, Grese’s poor academic performance leads her to leave school and her father’s home at age fifteen in search for work instead. Her first employment was six months at an agricultural farm before working at a hospital. Upon entering the hospital, Grese knew she desired to become a trained nurse and work there permanently. Despite her hard work, the German Labor Exchange denied her request and removed her from the hospital after two years . Once again, Grese found herself relocated and employed at another farm. Although discouraged, she did not protest her employment at the dairy farm and persistently reapplied to become a nurse. Her efforts were rejected a second time in 1942 and was being transferred once more. Only this time, Grese objected the Labor Exchange’s decision to send her away. Irma Grese, now nineteen years old and without a family, quietly left after much deliberation to a job at Ravensbruck Concentration…
During the Holocaust, 1.5 million children were killed when they arrived in cantankerous killing centers; killed immediately after birth, dying after not decorous medical experiments, dying from starvation and diseases. Many have survived because of the help of people or because of their own strength. Many innocent children had been involved in the Holocaust. Some had been on Kindertransports, some have died in camps, and some had been in orphanages. Children who were kept away from the Holocaust were called “Hidden Children”. A nine-year-old girl, Judith Pinczovsky, survived the Holocaust because of the strength of her mother. After the war, children had to start their lives over with parents or without. Most importantly, Children of the…