Holocaust Remembered: Testimony

Holocaust survivors are a dwindling breed. They are elderly survivors of the modern century's blot on humanity. In its cold-blooded and determined sweep, institutionalized organization and rationalization the Holocaust represents the single most horrific attempt at genocide that has yet succeeded in a world gone mad with hatred.

The odiously wretched indecency of world leaders gaining knowledge of the extermination of Europe's Jews and deciding it was simply too inconvenient to grapple with the issue -- particularly at that time, and particularly as no one wanted to add to their nation's already onerous number of Jews -- gave their stamp of indifference to the cynical Nazis who knew there would be no interference with their resolute march partnering the Angel of Death.

The death camps were well considered with respect to their placement. Nazi officials involved in the Europe-wide venture to dehumanize Jews through slandering caricature as a venal, deceitful, controlling and vicious underclass of society striving to achieve dominance on the world stage of politics, economics and news promulgation, succeeded in deepening already-existing anti-Semitism. They understood where best to place the work camps, detention camps, death camps.

Among conservative, rural populations where that very specific kind of racism was already deeply entrenched.

Among the multitudes of disinterested bystanders preferring ignorance of knowledge of the proceedings to involving themselves in any manner to decry the inhuman isolation, victimization and slaughter, emerged a coterie of individuals who with their families quietly and with huge compassion risked their all to aid wherever and whenever they could those among them who were destined for slaughter; enabling some to survive the dreadful human-made cataclysm.

Detail from drawing by Warsaw Ghetto and death camp survivor Morris Wyszogrod of SS Untersturmfuhrer Reinhold Feix, commander of Budzyn camp, strangling a prisoner with the reins of his horse in 1943. - Photo:

"I remember looking down and I happened to be standing on my grandmother's tombstone. The Germans walked among us and anytime they saw a mother with a child, they tore the child from her arms and threw them into the back of trucks."
"I looked around and I just said 'Mother, this is where we are going to be separated."
"I didn't even feel it when the Germans hit me but every time they struck my mother and brother it was like they were cutting my flesh."
Asher Aud Sieradski, 86, (Poland)

"They asked me what my name was and I said 'Romka Vochick'. That is the name that saved me." Two sisters, 8 and ten fleeing the Nazi invasion of their hometown of Buchach, Ukraine. For years they hid, sleeping in fields, subsisting on scraps of food given them by non-Jews. They were eventually caught on the street and handed to the Gestapo. She lied; her sister couldn't bring herself to do the same. "She had an accent and was afraid." And so, she died.
Ester Koffler Paul, 82, (Galicia, Ukraine)

"I remember the scary things. I remember crying and being so hungry that I couldn't fall asleep."
"They burst into the house and started to search for documents, turning over furniture and tearing down wallpaper. One soldier stood and stared at me. I sat frozen, not daring to move. I was so frightened I almost couldn't breathe. Then came a Dutch policeman who was accompanying the German soldiers and he told the soldier that he saw something in another room. By luring the soldier away, he probably saved my life."
Jacob Philipson Armon, 76 (The Netherlands)

"The first thing they did was beat us and separate the women from the men. It happened so quickly, I couldn't even part from my mother and sister."
"I remember him [his father] begging: 'I am still young, I can run, I can work'. But it didn't help and I couldn't say farewell to him either."
"The hardest part is not having a Jewish grave for my parents in which to honour them."
Shmuel Bogler 84 (Hungary)