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Of the Holocaust Helan Waterford says-
“While we will forever mourn, revenge must never detract from
remembering our dead. To condemn all Germans reduces us to the level of the
Nazis who hated every Jew, every gypsy, every Slav…. If we follow the
scripture ‘ An eye for an eye….’ We will all be eventually blind!” |
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Sigi Hart- “Before Hitler, we had many
friends. Jews could actually own
stores and restaurants, we had good times with friends and family, we could
go to the movies, do and buy any thing we wanted. Then Hitler came to power,
and I was put in the back of the classroom because I was Jewish. After school if you didn’t go straight
home, Jews were beaten on the streets.
So we went to the Jewish temple to hang out with friends, do school
work, and play games.” “ We couldn’t go to the parks
without getting beat up. For written
upon the benches it said, (in German) ‘ NOT FOR JEWS!’ |
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Frances Katz- Paraphrased quotes- ‘A Jew could make a living no more, a Jew could
not go on the streets or they beat you up, usually no one came back from streets’ |
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Hellmuth Jzprycer- Paraphrased quotes- ‘ We watched them burn books
upon the thousands, in one big pile. Tossing extras in as they burned. We all felt emotionally the same as they
were in their minds …… MAD!’ |
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Later on in the camps, some were only spared
because the gas chambers broke that day. Some were burned alive. One was shot on the spot because he
wouldn’t burn his dead mother. |
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Being taken from her home in the middle of
dinner prayer, Lili Weinberg remembers seeing a bird and thinking that she
wished she was that bird because it was free and she was not. She knew it was the beginning of hell. |
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Sam Kulawy- Paraphrased
quotes- ‘ My whole family was wiped out, my uncles,
aunts, grandmothers, grandfathers, cousins, sisters, brothers, my mom, and my
dad, everyone! They were all written
on wood. (They carved their own names
on the wooden posts in the barracks.) |
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Jeanine Burk- “Belgium was supposed to be neutral during the
war, but Adolph Hitler ignored that [and] invaded Belgium. There was a movement where you could
inquire about hiding Jews hiding children, and my father did that. He had a place for me and he took me on
the street car to a woman’s house, and the reason that I keep saying ‘this
woman’ is I don’t know her name.” “The only people that knew her name were my
parents, I was a little girl then.
They took me to the house- - my father actually- - he brought me into
the house, and that was the last time I ever saw my father.” “I was hidden for two years. O never went outside, I was not allowed to
go out side because I didn’t belong to the family, and the woman who hid me
sacrificed a lot to take me. Because,
had the Nazis discovered she was hiding a Jew, whether it was a little girl
or an adult it didn’t matter, they would have killed her on the spot. Of course, as well as me I was allowed
sometimes to go out in the back yard, but for the most part that was my home
for two years.” “ I was never mistreated- -ever! But I also was never loved,
and I really lost a great part of my childhood- - simply because we were
Jews.” |
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Eva Galler- “We were a big family. We were eight children; I am the oldest of
eight. When they took us to the
trains to take [us] to the death camp, I was seventeen years old and my
youngest brother was three years old and I still hear him scream.” ‘I WANT TO LIVE TOO’ “ People started to pull out those barbed wires
and jumped through those little windows.
Even the S.S. people sat on the rooftop of the train and shot, but
everybody took a chance. Whoever
could, who ever it was possible to take a chance. Well, my father told us, when young people started to jump, he
said, ‘you [are] the oldest three- -I was seventeen and my sister sixteen,
and my brother fifteen- - you oldest try.
Maybe somebody will survive.’ “ So the parents went with the small
children. My sister … My brother
jumped first, my sister second. Then
I jumped and landed in a ditch of snow, they shot after us. The shot… they keep on shooting, but the
bullet didn’t hit me. When I didn’t
hear any more the train, I got up.
And the first thing I did was I took off my star, and I took off my
star, and I promised myself never again will I ever wear a star. I went first to look after my sister and
brother and found them dead. And I
found many corpses… many corpses.
From that train one of my friends survived, too. She lives in New York. We were two people who survived under an
assumed name, and I was to work as a polish girl. And I worked on a farm, on a German farm, under a false name….
Pretended that I was catholic, and escaped until the end of the war.” |
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Edward r Murrow-report- “ There surged around me an evil smelling
stink, men and boys reached out to touch me.
They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death had already marked many of them, but
they were smiling with their eyes, I looked out over the mass of men to the
green fields beyond where well fed Germans were ploughing.” ‘ I asked to see the barracks where
Czechoslovaks sleep, but couldn’t get out of bed because of their weakness. 'The barracks were used before as a stable for
eighty horses, now holding 1200 men.
The smell was unbearable for five men to one bunk. I later found out
that twenty four out of 1200 men died that month, and I wasn't that amazed,
by the look of them.' 'I walked to the courtyard where three men just
then fell and died as they were crawling to the latrine. This is indescribable.' 'They
showed me the children, hundreds of them.
Some only six years old.'
" I could see their ribs through their shirts!" 'In
the hospital, it was full. I talked
to the doctor; he said that 200 had died the day before. I then asked what the asked what they died
from, he shrugged hid shoulders and said, "Tuberculosis, starvation,
fatigue, and there are many who don't desire to live. It is very difficult." 'He pulled
back the blanket from a man's feet to show me how swollen they were, and he
was dead.' '
In the kitchen, it was clean and run by Germans, one showed me the daily
rotation.' "One piece of brown bread about as thick as your thumb, on
top three sticks of gum. And a little stew, every 24 hours." 'He showed
me a chart on the wall, it was very complicated, there were many, many red
tabs scattered through out it. Each
red tab represented ten people that died.' He said, " We are very
efficient here." 'We went to the small courtyard, the wall adjoined what
had been a stable or a garage, it was floored with concrete. There were two rows of bodies stacked up
like cordwood, they were very white.
Most of the bodies were terribly bruise though there seemed to be
little flesh to bruise. Some had been
shot through the head, they only bled but a little.' 'More than 500 boys and men lay there in
two neat piles, and then a German trailer which contained another fifty, but
it was impossible to count them. The
clothing was in a big heap against the wall.
Most men and boys died of starvation and not execution.' "But the manor of death seemed
unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during
the last twelve years. Thursday, I
was told that there had been as many as 60,000. Where are they now?" "
I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I reported what I saw and heard, but only
part of it, for most of it I have no words." "If
I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I am not in
the least sorry...." "They died 900
a day in the Best Nazi Death Camp." April 16, 1945 |
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Samuel Pisar- "
In an instant, the realization flooded me; I was looking at the insignia of
the United States army.... My skull seemed to burst. With a wild roar, I broke through the
thatched roof, leaped to the ground and ran toward the tank.... Recalling the
only English I knew.... I yelled at the top of my lungs. 'God bless America!'
" In a few minutes all of us were free." |
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Elie Wiesel- When the Buchenwald
concentration camp was liberated in May 1945, Elie Wielsel was sixteen years
old. His parents and his sister had dies
in the camps, and Elie was barely alive from his recovery bed in a hospital,
he struggled to a mirror to look at himself, something he hadn’t done for
years, “ From the depths oh the mirror,” writes Wielsel at night, “a corpse
gazed back at me. The look in his
eyes as they stared at mine has never left me.” After the war Wiesel
did not return to his native Hungary but he went instead to France where he
learned French and worked for ten years as a journalist. From France he moved to Israel and eventually
to the United States where he became a professor at Boston University. “Night” an
autobiographical account of Wiesel’s life in Buchenwald, was the first of
more than twenty books. “ He writes,” says
one admirer, “ out of infinite pain, partly to honor the dead, but also to
warn [them] that it could happen again and that it must never happen again.” |
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Joseph Sher- “ In 1945 or 46 after the war
we lived in a small little town, Nuremburg vorm Wald. We lived DP,DP, displaced persons, they
live in one building all of them. And
we got the UNRRA, they called the UNRRA, and they give us, they feed us, and
they give us every month packages. We
got little shuland, we got little sewing.
So one day was a Tom Tov, a holiday, I don’t remember the holiday,
either Pesach or…. After a mean, a good Shabbos… a good Yom Tov meal, two
boys from the house went… took a walk and they walked… they walked… In
Nuremburg vorm Wald was a woods, forest, and they walked in the forest and
they got a little dog with them. They
got raised a little dog… and all of a sudden the dog got crazy [and] started
scraping, and they started to help [digging] and they saw an arm from a … So
they came back around and they find a dead man. And we went to the police, and the police call us, and we have
leaders, you know, and we went over there to start… they brought shovels and
start grabbing… it was dead people… about maybe fifty. Big Big… and we find out when I came here
somebody ask me how did you know they were Jews? We find out…we find tefillin in the pockets most, not most some
got little Jewish book, a little bencherle, a siddurle and that’s [ how] we
found out they were Jews… So we with the Germans help with the German with
Burgermeister, they all felt bad and they gave us... the Burgermeister told
us he can give you a way to burry them, he gave us on the cemetery a corner,
you can see here crosses, so [I] was satisfied. We took piece by piece and some arms fell off,. and some limbs
fell off and we took big blankets and we put piece by piece, and we all
worked a couple of days and brought them to the cemetery, and we make, we
give them their rite, and we said Kaddish after them, we give them a El Malei
Rachamin. And even a Rabbi, a Rabbi
came to give them the rites, and this was 1945 or 46, I wouldn't remember the
months, and we all felt that we done some good deed to get the Jews a good
burial!" |
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Helen Waterford-
" The lileis of the valley were never more
beautiful tham in May of 1945... I walked out [of] the gate at the woman's
Labor Camp in Kratzau, Czechoslovakia -- FREE!!! I threw myself into the large feild of these dainty little
flowers, embracing as many as I could, overwhelmed by their fragrance, which
fitted me with joy, hope, rebirth and a new security." |
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Hadassah Bimko- " For the great part of the liberated
Jews... there was no ecstasy, no joy at our liberation. We had lost our families, our homes, we
had no place to go, nobody to hug, nobody who was waiting for us, anywhere we
had been liberated from... the fear of death, but we were not free from the
fear of life!" |
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Lacy Hoobler 7th Social Studies Rossville Jr. High Holocaust Project Spring 2003 |