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| published by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem |
These words should not have been written.
The events described in these books should not have happened.
But they did.
And because these atrocities did happen, and some people had the courage to write them down, they have become part of the record of human life on this earth.
Some people, like me, will decide to read these books in order to understand the worst about who we are as humans. We will also find courage and heroism and kindness here and there amidst the horror.
Others will decide not to read them. It's hard enough to get up in the morning and carry on, without having the cruelties described in these books at the back of our minds.
When I visited Yad VaShem, the museum of Holocaust remembrance, I bought several books written by Holocaust survivors. I spent the last ten days of January, as well as February and March, reading them, absorbing one after another of the bitter but engrossing stories.
Here's a list of personal accounts of the Holocaust with a few notes on each one to guide others who may want to glimpse the enormity of human loss in the 1940s in Europe.
Eva Rosenfeld Brown
If You Save One Life: A Survivor's Memoir by Eva Brown written with Tom Fields-Meyer (Los Angeles: Upper Story Press, 2007). 150 pages.
I came across this book when I took a writing course with Tom. Eva grew up as a rabbi's daughter in a small town in Hungary, 150 miles east of Budapest. When she was 16, in March 1944, the Germans took over Hungary. On June 9 her family was deported by train to Auschwitz, Poland, the death camp ruled by Josef Mengele. She survived, barely. "One more day and I would likely be dead," she writes."I was barely clinging to life. I was 17 years old and weighed no more than 65 pounds."
Rutka Laskier
Rutka's Notebook: January - April 1943 edited by Daniella Zaidman-Mauer (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2007). 71 pages.
When her notebook begins, Rutka is a happy but worried child of 14 living in Bedzin, Poland, after the German invasion of Poland in 1939. She reports about a ghetto being set up in Bedzin to include her neighborhood. She visits friends and discusses two boys on whom she has a crush. But in August of 1943, her family was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Her father survived, remarried, and had a daughter who first learned about Rutka when she herself was 14 years old. Rutka is sometimes called "the Polish Anne Frank."
Ilse Hahn Kaufmann
The Journey of Ilse Kaufmann: Vienna--Prague--Buenos Aires by Ilse Kaufmann and Helena Pardo, trans. from Spanish by Susana Urra (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014). 196 pages.
Ilse Hahn began life as a privileged child of a wealthy family in Vienna. Her grandmother, Mathilde Goldschmidt, was treated by Sigmund Freud in the years when he was just beginning psychoanalysis. Her family fled Austria to Prague, and then her parents were able to get visas on the last train with Jews leaving for Spain in 1941. Wealth played a part in their escape as well as in Ilse's survival and escape. She talked a friend and hotel manager into marrying her, and he later got a job with the Argentine Embassy, which along with financial payments facilitated their escape with their young son to Argentina in February, 1943.
Georgina Glasgall Gomori
Georgina: Holocaust Memoirs by Gabriella Kovac with Oliver R. Shead (Middletown, Delaware: Gabriella Kovac, 2017). 127 pages.
Georgina's daughter Gabriella wrote this story of her mother's life, beginning with Georgina's father Vilmos Glasgall, the son of a Scottish adventurer and a Hungarian beauty. Vilmos always told his daughter that nothing could harm her because she was the descendant of two great races. She grew up in a well-to-do family in Hungary and was sent to finishing school in Switzerland, returning in 1935 when she was 18. She and her brother went to Budapest in 1938, and she started a business there. Her father had lost all his money by investing in the American stock marker. She married a small businessman in 1943 and managed to hide underground 'and evade deportation from Budapest while her husband was gone repairing motorbikes for the German army. Both she and he were able to pose as non-Jews because of their light hair and features. But after the war, Soviet occupation of Hungary posed new dangers. Finally in 1957 she, her husband, and their two children managed to escape from Hungary to Austria and then to Ausstralia.
Klara Iutkovits Wizel
Auschwitz Escape: The Klara Wizel Story by Danny Naten and R. J. Gifford (San Bernardino, CA: Beverly Naten, 2018). 199 pages.
These books are all hair-raising, but Klara's story includes perhaps the narrowest escape from the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Danny Naten researched, wrote, and directed a documentary about Klara's life, and then R. J. Gifford produced the book version. Born in 1927, Klara grew up in northern Romania near the Ukrainian and Hungarian borders. In her small town, Sighet, the family of Elie Wiesel lived two houses away on her block. In 1940, Germany gave her part of Romania to Hungary. In March 1944, Germans themselves took over the area. She and her family were deported to Auschwitz in May. She learned that her parents had been gassed and cremated. By November she stopped eating. In December Mengele selected her for execution in the gas chamber, but she managed to break an adobe brick out of the wall under a window and slip out. She joined a truck of women being taken to a slave labor camp, where a woman doctor brought her back to life and she worked until the end of the war. Afterward she returned to Sighet, found her sisters, and married the second cousin of Elie Wiesel. I found this book for sale at a lecture I attended at the American Jewish University earlier this year.
Eddie Weinstein
17 Days in Treblinka: Daring to Resist, and Refusing to Die by Eddie Weinstein, ed. Noah Lasman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008). 174 pages.
Unlike the other survivors, Eddie Weinstein wrote his story in 1947, very soon after it occurred. His mother was murdered in the Treblinka death camp, and his brother Srulik (Israel) and his cousin Chaim were also killed there. Eddie grew up in Losice, a town in eastern Poland not far from Warsaw. When the Germans invaded Poland in September, 1939, the great synagogue in his town was destroyed and his family fled but later returned. Jews lost their businesses and were forced to do slave labor. A ghetto was formed in Losice in December, 1949. Eddie and his brother and cousin worked in labor camps until August, 1942, when they were forced into train cars and deported to Treblinka death camp. There he managed to survive with the help of his brother and cousin. After 17 days, when he and two others were loading victims' belongings onto empty trains to be shipped away and sold, they slipped into a car and hid under the pile of clothes. At a stop they escaped into the forest, returned to a previous labor camp, and blended in with others. Later they escaped and hid in underground dugouts for about two years with the help of local persons, whom they paid. Finally Russian troops reached their area.
Isabelle Choko, Frances Irwin, Lotti Kahana-Aufleger, Margit Raab Kalina, and Jane Lipski
Stolen Youth: Five Women's Survival in the Holocaust by Isabelle Choko, Frances Irwin, Lotti Kahana-Aufleger, Margit Raab Kalina, and Jane Lipski (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Survivors' Memoir Project, 2005).
This book is actually the personal story of five women with some photos, a total of 335 pages.
Isabelle Choko-Sztrauch-Galewska -- My First Life trans. from French by Irene Rothenberg. 71 pages.
Isabelle writes that if she did not have pains and scars and a friend who also suffered "even I would have trouble believing in the reality of my own nightmarish experience." She grew up in Lodz, Poland. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland and by February of 1940, about 200,000 people were forced to move into a ghetto in Lodz. She was 12 years old. When she was 15, she contracted typhoid and her father died. Then she and her mother were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. In February 1945, she and her mother were transported to the Bergen-Belsen camp. Her mother died, and she was so sick and weak she could barely stand up to go get a bowl of soup. On April 15 the British liberated the camp, but she was close to death. She was taken to Sweden and nursed back to life.
Frances Irwin-- "Remember To Be a Good Human Being": A Memoir of Life and the Holocaust. 37 pages.
Frances lived in Konskie in central Poland before the war. She first heard about Hitler in 1936 when she was 14. The Germans arrived in September, 1939, and her family was forced into a ghetto, where they lived almost a year before a deportation to Treblinka started. Her father told her to run out of the ghetto and hide. She reluctantly obeyed him and hid in a sewer with other Jews. She made it to her brother-in-law's house in the ghetto of nearby Radom, but she was captured there. She was taken to Auschwitz, where she survived for two years. In January 1945 the entire camp was forced to march out of the camp as the Russians approached; those who could not walk were shot. She ended up in the death camp of Mauthausen, Austria, and then in another camp for women. As the liberators approached, the Nazis tried to get all the women to drink poison soup, but a French kitchen worker warned them in broken German not to eat it. Then their captors disappeared and the next morning American soldiers arrived. After a period of recuperation, she married another survivor and they emigrated to the USA.
Lottie Kahana Aufleger--Eleven Years of Suffering. 75 pages.
Lottie lived in Czernowitz, Romania, with her husband and three-year-old daughter until September 18, 1939, when German bombs dropped in her community. She was 27 years old and her family owned a business paving roads. In October 1941, they learned that they would be deported to a concentration camp the next day. They managed to escape that deportation but in June 1942, they were deported to a camp on the Bug River in eastern Poland near the border with Ukraine. They survived by buying food from local farmers selling illegally to the prisoners. Finally the Red Army freed them early in 1944. In 1946 they were allowed to emigrate to Romania and then to Israel, and she reunited with her daughter and her husband, who had survived through various subterfuges.
Margit Raab Kalina--Surviving a Thousand Deaths--Memoir: 1939-1945. 42 pages.
Margit tells her story in present tense and with short, terse sentences. It is the most well-written memoir in the book. It begins when she is 16 and her family is fleeing from a small town in Czech Silesia to live with a relative in eastern Poland. Then they flee war and arrive in a Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish town. In bombings there, her father dies. They flee to another town, Tarnow, where her mother is shot and killed. Margit works in a factory. Her brother is deported on a train to Auschwitz and gassed at age 22. In 1943 she is deported to Plaszow, a forced labor camp near Krakow. In spring 1944 she is taken to Auschwitz. In December 1944 she is deported to Bergen-Belsen camp in northern Germany. She gets typhoid spread by lice. On April 15, 1945 the British army liberates Bergen-Belsen. She remains unconscious for three weeks but eventually recovers. She joins relatives in Bratislava and later emigrates to the USA.
Jane Lipski (Jadzia Szpigelman)--My Escape into Prison and other Memories of a Stolen Youth, 1939-1948. 67 pages.
Jane grew up in Bedzin, southwest Poland, in an Orthodox Jewish family, the sixth child though two had died. In the summer of 1939 she was 14 years old and spent a month at a Zionist youth camp, where she decided she wanted to emigrate to Israel. Her life changed when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. She describes increasing restrictions on Jews and then the formation of a ghetto in Bedzin, from which mass deportations began in August 1942. Jane's youth group evolved into a resistance organization. As a partisan (resistance worker), she began traveling to deliver letters and steal weapons. Meanwhile, her parents, her two sisters and their families were transported to Auschwitz in August, 1943. Her two sisters survived. She married another partisan and became pregnant. When Russians took over eastern Poland, he was sent to Russia and she chose to go with him. They both became trapped in a Soviet prison, where she gave birth to her son. Her husband died and she did not manage to get out of prison and out of Russia until January, 1948. She learned that her two sisters had survived Auschwitz, and her brother was alive too. She emigrated to Israel, where her brother lived, in 1950. She married and in 1958 moved to the USA.
Elie Wiesel
Night by Elie Wiesel (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1958), trans. to English by Stella Rodway (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960). 110 pages.
Elie won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He was born in Sighet, in northern Romania near the Ukrainian and Hungarian borders, an area also called Transylvania. As a teenager, he was deported with his family to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp and then later he and his father were marched and transported by train to Buchenwald. His father died there. On April 10, 1945, the resistance within the camp overthrew the SS guards, and by evening American soldiers arrived. Elie became ill with food poisoning but somehow survived. He lived to age 96 and died in 2005. I read this book years ago, in the 1990s maybe, but skimmed it again this year.
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