Extracts from: "When they came to take my father: Voices of the Holocaust"
Photographs by Mark Sliger Introduction by Robert Jay Llifton
Arcade Publishing 1996 New York
pg 14 Bimba Beck Born: April 18,1918 Birthplace: Inbjija, Yugoslavia Imprisoned in Sarajevo; interned on an island off Italy Occupation: Retired Jeweler Current Residence: New York; New York
"I told my father what I had seen in Vienna and begged him to leave Yugoslavia. He listened to me and cuddled me and then told me that I was home and eveything was okay and I should forget about it . This man who I adored, I hated at that second. I realised then that we are made in a very interesting way. No matter how hard we try , we do not understand or believe anything unless we see it, touch it, smell it. The next year I went to Paris to finish school. Then I came home. Of course, I didn't do anything with my degree.
When Hitler entered Yugoslavia I remember standing in our yard when a German soldier, a young boy really, approached me and asked for a glass of milk. After we walked a few steps, I stopped and said, "You really shouldn't ask for milk from a Jewish girl's hand.'" The boy stopped and looked at me and said, "Oh, my goodness. You look just like everybody else."
pg 22 Livia Bitton Jackson Birthplace: Chamorein, Cechoslovakia Auschwitz Survivor Occupation: Professor of Holocaust studies at the City University of New York Current Residence: New York, New York.
"The selection at Auschwitz was quite automatic. They didn't give us time to think. It was like being on a moving conveyor belt, rushing forward. When we reached [Josef]? Mengele, the line slowed somewhat and we were immediately separted into two groups. Mothers with their children, older people, the handicapped, went immediately to the left and to the gas chambers. To the right went people above sixteen and below forty-six.
My mother and my aunt and I were locked arm to arm . We were already marching to the left when Mengele noticed my hair. I was very tall for my age. And I had greenish eyes and very light blonde hair, vey thick and straight and long, which I work braided. It was quite unusual.
I had the ideal Aryan look, what Hitler was breeding for. So when he noticedme in the line he reached with his stick and he said, "You, stop. You come here." He took one of my braids in his hands and said, "What beautiful golden hair you have." His tone was very gentle. "Are you Jewish? Is that your mother?" I told him it was. So he called my mother back and he said. " Now the two of you, you go this way." And my aunt started to cry. And she said, "Lorika, don't leave me." She was paniky. My mother stopped and turned to Mengele and said, "Please let me go with my sister. She needs me." And he said, "No, you go with your daughter. She needs you more."
pg 48 Harry Joseph Feldinger Birthplace: Munkach, Czechoslovakia (currently the Ukraine) Auschwitz prisoner #B14670 Occupation: Hotelier Current Residence: Long Beach, New York.
"When they finished beating me, they threw me aside, and I was dragged to barrack where they put people who were sick or old, people who were to be disposed of. The Nazis would collect them all in one barrack and then during the night take them away by trucks to the gas chambers. When they threw me into that barrack. I knew right away that I was doomed. I couldn't sit or lie down because of the beating I got, so I stood while one of the guards walked back and forth with a stick, warning people not to escape-not that you could anyway, since the barrack was locked from the outside. I watched him go back and forth, estimating how long it took him to walk from one end of the barrack to the other.
After timing him for quite a while, I knew I would be able to climb on top of the oven when he was walking in the other direction, and from there to the top to the beams, then jump out of the window and off the roof, run across to the lantrines, and let myself into the lantrine without being caught.
But I had to belong to a barrack. I didn't have my numbers yet. Everybody had a little piece of a rag on their lapels stating which barrack they belonged to. So early the next morning, I pulled a rag off someone's lapel. I noticed I belonged to barrack 24.
Then they selected people again, and all young people were taken. It was during Sukkoth (Tabernacles). This time, there was no escape. They told us to undress. There were numbers on the walls so that we would remember where we hung our clothes, they said. We stood in line for the gas chamber, about a thousand people. But all of a sudden the SS came in and started hollering. "Alle Jugend auf eine Seite! which means, "All young people on one side." Kids like me-thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen years olds. They selected about fifty altogether and took us to the D section - the working lager. And then they tatooed my number on me. My number was B14670."
pg 54 Bella Gottesman Born: August 7, 1920 Birthplace: Vienna, Austria Refugee in Romania Occupation: Yiddish poet and songwriter Current Residence: Bronx, New York.
"They told us to get ready, that the entire Jewish population was going to spend the winter on a farm. Nobody thought that people would be shot. The fact is that people were shot in all the villages. In some, families were tied together with barbed wire and sent to the river and shot there. A few of these families managed to escape, and they went to the town of Zastavna to report what was done to them. They had no idea that the order had come from high up. So the policemen took them back and did the same thing."
pg 59 Greek Jews at a Gathering of Survivors Sephardic Jewish Center of Forest Hills, New York.
"Woman: We got off the train at Auschwitz and the selection began. We were separted from our families right away. In the morning we saw the flames and the smoke and asked the other people in the camp. "What is this?" They answered, "Your parents".
"Woman: They took us to the showers and cut our hair. We didn't recognise each other."
"Woman: I didn't even recognise our sister!"
"Woman: I was very lucky. The block supervisor loved my voice. She took me by the hand to every block to sing. I used to sing "Mamma, son tanto felice." They went crazy over that song. It had just come out in Greece. We were so depressed, singing that song. We cried, because we knew didn't have mothers anymore."
"Woman: The orchestra played while people burned"
pg 60 "Man: My grandfather was born in Jerusalem, my father was born in Yugoslavia, my mother in Bulgaria. I was born in Greece, my wife in Germany, my son in Israel, and my daughter in America. This is what it is to be a Jew."
pg 66 To Light Daily Six Million Memorial Candles by Yaffa Eliach
"Then and there on the plane I decided to creat my own holocaust memorial, in the form of a written history of Ejszyszki. Rather than focusing on the forces of destruction of the long life of the community. And though I did not then know what artifacts I would find for such a collection, I committed myself to gathering together everything I could find from the shtetl. As one of only twenty-nine survivors, I wanted to memorialise as many of its former inhabitants as possible, both those who left and tthe 3,500 who remaine in the shtetl-who were murdered on September 25 and 26, 1941, by the Einsatzgruppen (the German mobile killing squads)and their Lithuanian collaborators."
pg 69 Adolf Hager Born:October 2, 1924 Birthplace:Vienna, Austria Refugee in Switzerland Occupation: Retired accountant Current Residence:Brooklyn, New York.
"People were being dragged out of their stores and beaten up and trampled upon. There were trucks on the streets collectings Jews. They took them all to a central place where people stood around beating them with sticks, screaming, "Dirty Jews! We should kill you all." All the schools and community centers were filled with people, and you could hear the screams from the beatings; you could hear the Viennese people saying, "Let's burn down all the Jews." People who had Jewish friends, who worked for Jews, who went together to the coffeehouses, who played football together, all of a sudden they changed completely. They were not the same people anymore."
"When they got to Dachau they had to stand in one place for three days without food. They couldn't even use the toilet. After three days the Nazis put them in barracks. But for a week and a half they didn't let them sleep - all night they woke them up. And in the morning, they ahd to march just the same. All day long they had to march. This was in the middle of winter, in November. And every day they took out someone else from the barracks and tied him to a tree and left him there. That was their sport"
pg 74 Irene Hizme Born: December 21, 1937 Birthplace:Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslavakia With her twin brother, Rene, was part of Mengele's experiments in Auschwitz Current Residence:Long Island, New York
"We were four years old.
My memories of Theresienstadt are KaleidoScopic. I remember a very long train ride, waiting in line for food, cobblestone roads and dead bodies on carts. And then one day I guess it was the day we were being shipped to Auschwitz, I remember a very long walk to the train. There were a lot of people, it was snowing, there were dogs barking, and I heard the sound of rifle fire. I remember holding onto my mother's hand. I was always holding onto her hand.
Rene and I were separated. Siblings of the opposite sex didn't get to stay together. As part of Mengele's great scientific plan to find a master race, he had a passion for studying twins. Usually one twin was the control and one was experimented on. It seemed I was the lucky one who got to go to the hospital fo all kinds of experiments.
Could I pick Mengele out? Never in a million years. I only remembera doctor in a white coat. He once gave me candy. It was all so innocent. He was a savior and our demon. You had this ambivalent feeling, wanting him to like you. I would think, I'll be really good and then he'll be my friend, then he won't hurt me. But it wasn't like that. There are things that I've never spoken about, that I don't think I'll ever speak about.
It's very hard to really find the right words to explain what I felt as a child. I lost my childhood, I had no childhood. I remember having a doll that Rene smashed. Unbelievably, that was a real memory, even in the camps. But if I'd still had her then, I wouldn't have known what to do with her anymore. I remember thinking who is in charge of this place? Is G-d in charge of Auschwitz?
pg 86 John Klein Born:Decemeber 22, 1925 Birthplace:Sassow, Poland Labor camp; partisan Occupation:Businessman Current Residence:New York, New York
They didn't even use bullets for the very small children. They just took the babies by the legs, hit their heads against the trees, and threw them in.
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