Why was I chosen to live. Joseph Alexander, 96, a slight man with a Polish accent, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, spoke on a sunny Sunday to a rapt crowd of about 30 at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Holocaust survivor interviews won’t be possible forever, with many Auschwitz survivors now in their late 80s. I was in a very bad state, I was already among the dead, and then I looked up. “And that's why he must have looked in that coach and thought to himself, ‘well perhaps I'll try and save a couple.’”. A candle lighting ceremony takes place at the United Nations Holocaust Memorial Ceremony . For young girls like ourselves, possibly even our mother [hadn't seen] us undressed. Estimates suggest that Nazis murdered 85% of the people sent to Auschwitz. When she was nine years old, Posner and her aunt were allowed to … We were taken to a ghetto first. When I wake up in the morning, I says, “You're not gonna let me down, I have to get up, I have to proceed with my lecture because I help people.” There is nothing greater and there's nothing bigger. “We looked back and we saw our mother with her spotted scarf, and we waved to her and we went ahead,” Mindu said. Founded April 25, 1995 as a "Cybrary of the Holocaust". Polish Victims: Individual Stories. Was there something else that God had in mind for me to fulfill? We stood at the end of the line, with my mum in the middle, Magda [my sister] and I. Survivors of Auschwitz on the day of liberation. We encourage all survivors to share their unique experiences to ensure their preservation for future generations. Then what? We were a family of inmates, we had to care for each other. We had a lovely home and an orchard and we had nice relations with our neighbors and our school friends, which were not always Jewish. He didn’t listen to me. I mean, we were just frightened out of our wits. I also discovered the best revenge in life is success. I have another plan in its place. No, I haven't. All Rights Reserved. Media Essay Polish Victims: Individual Stories. Unfortunately my graduation present became Birkenau Auschwitz. We had to sit all night on the stone floor. Something began rumbling in my brain like a volcano. We were all shmooshed up, you know, very small, little place, in the cattle car, on the floor, sitting down, and I am crawling to him and asking him to shave. Our heads shaven and then we were going in to be tattooed with a number and, from then on, we had no name, that was it. A doctor escorts a group of Auschwitz survivors from the camp in January 1945. “You are a seamstress,” he told them. We lived for each other. Saul Dreier, a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor, decided to start a klezmer band with Ruby Sosnowicz, a fellow Polish-born survivor and accomplished professional musician Grodno is located at the most north Eastern corner of Poland, on the Niemen River bordering Lithuania. We were stripped from every inch of human dignity. Although Julian's Polish Catholic parents had immigrated to the United States before World War I, his mother had returned to Poland and Julian was born in a village not far from the large town of Tarnow in southern Poland. We were [in the ghetto] for six weeks under terrible sanitation conditions. Nobody was hollering at me. Who they wanted to stay alive, go to the right; who was condemned to die, go to the left. I will make them pay for taking my family from me and leaving me without a burial site to visit. What is the motivation of people who deny that the Holocaust occurred? It was night, and by that time there was no room for us. Max Glauben was 13 when his family’s apartment was destroyed in the historic battle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I hear a gentleman speak with the French accent. A … She was the … On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, listen to the testimonies of 70 Holocaust survivors, drawn from the Visual History Archive at USC Shoah Foundation, as they recall their personal experiences in the Nazi extermination camp. I lived with my family in Grodno, Poland, a city of 65,000 inhabitants. But 55 years ago I was a (10) year old boy whose name was Hirshel Grodzienski. My name is Harold Gordon now! “She says, ‘I don't know where it is, I've never heard of the place.’ And then suddenly all this clatter of the doors opening, and when the doors opened I mean there was, just, all hell let loose.”. Holocaust survivors' stories As the number of survivors in the UK dwindles to 5,000, Stuart Jeffries commemorates Holocaust Memorial Day by hearing the stories … We passed by where the [women were]...my mother, my aunt, my cousins and their children all were naked as we glanced in, and they looked like they were in a trance. Culture and Education . During the Holocaust, millions of Jews throughout Europe were robbed by the Nazis of every possession they ever had, such as jewelry and paintings, from their homes and businesses. There were the barking dogs, viciously walking around, there were loudspeakers always and these SS men walking around, with shiny boots and guns on their back. Doherty arrived at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in July 1945, two months after the British had liberated the camp from the Nazis on 15 April. Holocaust survivor Sidney Zoltak shares his story and reunites with the Polish family that saved him from the Nazis. CTRL + SPACE for auto-complete. Once we got through all that routine, we were taken to block 14. 25,000 were of the Jewish faith and the majority were of Catholic persuasion . When we first glanced out, it looked like a twilight zone, big chimneys going to the sky, smoke was going all over. I just wanted to die. An official scrambled into their car. Judith Jagermann was a Holocaust survivor from Karlsbad. 136 kilometers to the North was the Baltic Sea and the Polish port city of Gdansk. My aunt, my mother's sister...heard that our transport came in, so she came to find us, Auntie Berthe. If you were feeling pale, or whatever, you weren't feeling right…you would prick your finger to draw some blood and make yourself rosy cheeks. They divided them up one potato per person per day. By collecting and recording Holocaust survivor stories, we keep their memories and histories alive for future generations. “Like many other survivors, I feel an obligation to tell my story again and again. Mindu Hornick, 90, was awarded an MBE in December 2019 for her two decades of work as a Holocaust educator teaching about the dangers of intolerance and hatred. It is and compare and contrast of two families where some members survived, but some unfortunately did not. Suddenly and without warning, I heard a call. Thirteen holocaust survivors share their deeply personal stories of the harrowing experiences they faced while in the largest German Nazi concentration camp and extermination center, Auschwitz. Men and women were immediately separated. Whenever there was a hanging, we were all called out to watch it, and I remember us shouting, ‘For God's sake, where is God?’ A young boy hung because he picked some bit of food up. So when people tell me I overcame, no, I never overcame, and I never forgot. Edited by Michael Declan Dunn, 25 Apr. Behind Every Name a Story consists of essays describing survivors’ experiences during the Holocaust, written by survivors or their families. My city was called Berehove, population was approximately 26,000. The Holocaust in Poland was part of the European-wide Holocaust and took place within the September 1, 1939, boundaries of Poland, which ceased to exist as a territorial entity after the German and Soviet invasion of Poland. Jan. 27 marks both International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I never saw my father again. The people on this list are or were survivors of Nazi Germany's attempt to exterminate the Jews in Europe before and during World War II.A state-enforced persecution of Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe lasted from the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 to Hitler's defeat in 1945. Nobody was beating me. When the children were separated at the border, I had very, very, very many nightmares, and I still do. When we arrived back to Buchenwald, they came to collect all the dead people from the cattle car to transport them to the crematorium. When they died, we took their clothes off to try to keep warmer. Two Survivors Of The Holocaust 1036 Words | 5 Pages. “I think that a kapo must have known that this train of mothers and children—that were no use to them for work—would end up in the gas chambers,” said Hornick. I woke up in the barrack. [Later, during one of several death marches] when you stopped you were shot right away, and I was about to stop. I graduated age of 18 from a gymnasium [an advanced secondary school]. FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. He told Mindu and her sister to lie about their age and skills. I think he picked up a potato skin or something. Historian: Polish society shunned Jewish survivors returning from death camps In ‘Ghost Citizens,’ Polish academic Lukasz Krzyzanowski delves … Another Polish Holocaust survivor who posed as a Catholic youth, Ruth Posner and her parents lived in the Warsaw Ghetto. I remember a young boy. These included injecting serum directly into children’s eyeballs to study eye color and injecting chloroform into the hearts of twins to determine if the siblings would die at the same time and in the same way. When author, educator and Holocaust survivor Max Eisen talks about his experience in Nazi-occupied Europe, he starts by remembering life before World War II. “I spelt it out for my mother,” Hornick recalled recently. You can't hate your enemies, as I said, because when you hate you're not living. Once, they found a mound of potatoes. [Polish survivors] (ID: 20811) View all names in this list Search names within this list. If you were just for the me, me, me, you never made it. 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