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Henry Aizenman was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1931, but grew up in Przytyk (pronounced “pshittik”), a small town with about 3,000 inhabitants where abuses against Jews were not uncommon. His parents were well educated and ardent Zionists (Jews who wanted to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine) who ran a bicycle and sewing machine shop. The family had hoped to move to Palestine in 1937 or 1938, but new British policies mandated they would have to leave their savings behind. The family decided to stay in Europe; this decision cost them their lives. The Aizenman family was aware of rumors emanating from Germany after Hitler came to power. As one of the few families with a radio, they had even listened to Hitler’s speeches, but
this threatening attitude toward Jews was nothing new to the Jews of Poland.
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Soon after, the Jewish people of Przytyk were forced to perform hard labor, including Henry’s highly-respected grandfather who was forced to dig ditches.
Once the Germans got organized, Henry and his family were moved to a ghetto in Jedlinsk. He was 9 years old. From Jedlinsk, the Aizenmanns moved to a work camp near a German air base where his father, a skilled mechanic, worked for the Germans. Then it was on to a “semi-concentration camp” called Pionki, where they worked in a munitions factory – the largest in Poland. It was at Pionki that 10 or 11 year old Henry realized what was ahead. He was working extremely hard and food was not available. Because of the scarcity of water, many of the prisoners drank diluted, 192-proof alcohol that was used in the manufacture of the gunpowder at the plant.
Due to the highly flammable materials at the plant, there were many fires. It was in one of these fires that Henry’s mother was killed.
From Pionki, Henry and his father were sent together to Auschwitz in a cattle car. About half the people who arrived with them were sent directly to the gas chambers. It is somewhat unusual that Henry was not killed since he was so young, but he was rather large for his age and in his papers he was listed as an apprentice mechanic to his master mechanic father, so the Germans kept him alive.
As Henry says, he was always hungry and always scared. In order to survive, the prisoners had to direct all their energies toward living. They scrounged for food and clothing, stealing them from the kitchen or from other, weaker prisoners. One way in which prisoners like Henry were able to get more food involved ingenuity and bravery. They would fashion buckets out of cans, using wire for handles. At mealtimes, when the prisoners were delivering the vats of soup to the barracks, they would run out and dip their cans in, and then run away as quickly as possible. Some were caught and killed, but others got extra soup.
Cruelest among the prisoners were the kapos, usually German or Polish criminals who acted as heads of barracks. The kapos would beat and often kill prisoners; even young Henry was beaten on several occasions.
From Auschwitz, Henry and his father, still together, were sent to a work camp in Germany-proper called Braunschweig. This journey, in cattle cars, was one of the most difficult. They were on the road for a week or more, often left on a siding without food or water because the Allies were bombing. Without his father’s care he would have died.
At Braunschweig, the prisoners worked for a truck manufacturer making engines. It was here that Henry recalls one of the few kindnesses he experienced in the camps. As Henry was walking to work on his night shift (12-hours), an old lady working there threw him a brown paper bag. He hid the bag in his shirt until their toilet break, when he discovered a piece of pound cake. Henry and his father were able to trade little slivers of cake for larger slivers of bread from other prisoners.
It was at Braunschweig that Henry lost his father. His father, Boruch, became ill and was placed in the infirmary. Although precise details are not available, other prisoners told him that his father was murdered by the infirmary doctor who injected him with a bubble of air.
On May 2, 1945, Henry was liberated by American soldiers from another camp called Ludwigslüst, to which he had been moved late in the war. Every year, on May 2, Henry celebrates his “born-again birthday party” to commemorate his liberation form the camp. Following liberation, Henry lived in Europe for three years, first with friends and then with a relative. Of his one-time large extended family, only he and three aunts survived.
Henry’s decision to come to America was somewhat “a lark.” He probably would have gone to Palestine as his parents had planned, but the boat for America left first. He read everything he could get his hands in an effort to make up for the education he had lost. Henry settled in New York with family members who had come to America before the Holocaust, and then moved to Kansas City to be “out west” where cowboys were. In 1958, he got a job working for a company selling costume jewelry, and moved to Birmingham where he raised 3 children.
In spite of the horrors he experienced, Henry says he still believed in the basic goodness of humanity. After he was liberated, he put things away in his mind into what he calls “little boxes,” and often these little boxes remain locked tightly until something triggers one of them to release a memory. This happened once when he happened to see a television movie called Playing for Time, a film about the all-female camp orchestra at Auschwitz. Although he rarely watches shows about the Holocaust, this one caught his attention because it opened one of his “little boxes” and made him remember an orchestra playing Strauss waltzes when he was undergoing selection upon arrival at Auschwitz. After all these years, he says things still come back that he didn’t even know he remembered.
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Max Herzel was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1930. His father, Oscar, was a diamond cutter and his mother, Nachama, was a seamstress with her own shop. He has one brother, Harry.
Max was 10 years old when the Germans invaded Belgium on May 10, 1940. The Herzel family, after traveling 7 days and nights in a crowded boxcar, found refuge in Southern France.
Soon after, France was invaded by German troops. As a result of the French armistice, the country was divided into a German controlled northern section and a French controlled (yet strongly Germany influenced) southern section known as Vichy, France.
The Herzel’s ended up in the detention camp of Agde and when that camp burned down they were transferred to the detention camp of Rivesaltes, a pipeline to the concentration camps. When all the males were forced to report for hard labor, Max’s father decided the family should try to escape. Through bribery, the family made a successful escape to Marseilles and managed to evade the police with their false identification cards.
About late 1941 or early 1942, the police caught up with the Herzels and Max’s father and brother were taken to a work camp. Upon their release, Max’s older brother went to fight for the French Underground and his father went into hiding. Having been separated from her husband and oldest son, Max’s mother became so distraught that she attempted suicide and was placed in a Psychiatric Hospital. Here, a sympathetic doctor allowed her to stay for the duration of the war, working as a seamstress and aid.
Little Max, essentially an orphan had to be placed in Jewish and later Christian orphanages, four in all. When these places became too dangerous, he was placed by an underground Jewish agency, OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants or Children's Aid Society), on a remote farm in the French Alps where he worked for his food and lodging, posing as a Catholic orphan.
The end of hiding from the French Vichy authorities came soon after the landing of the Allied forces in Southern France. The social worker of the OSE gathered all the hidden children and made every effort to reunite them with their families.
Max, his brother and mother were the only survivors from his family. Max's father, Oscar,
escaped to Italy where he was taken from Balzano, Italy to Auschwitz in 1942 and later transferred to Buchenwald where he died on February 26, 1945 at the age of 44. Besides his father and his father’s family (7 siblings and families) in Poland, Max lost 13 of his mother’s family including siblings and families.
Max immigrated to the United States in 1948 and settled in New York where family members had been found. His uncle and aunt (siblings of his mother) and their spouses brought them to the U.S. They had immigrated to the United States in the 1920's. Max served four years in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean conflict.
Max has been married to the former Cecille Herman
since 1955. They have son and a daughter. He is a retired executive from the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Birmingham and is a member of the Alabama Holocaust Commission and Birmingham Holocaust Education Committee.
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Aisic Hirsch was 9 years old in September 1939 When German tanks rolled through his small town of Mogielnica, outside of Warsaw, Poland. They soon set fire to both Jewish synagogues. On the second Sabbath, the Germans rounded up the 2 Hasidic rabbis and some others and took them to the main market. Poles helped cut off their payas (sidecurls), stripping them naked and beating them up. The soldiers then shot and hung their captives. Thousands watched.
In 1941, after more than a year in a local ghetto, Aisic, his mother and 5 year-old brother were transported to the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of the ghettos organized by the Nazis in Poland. Aisic describes it as “absolute misery – rats and sickness everywhere.”
Watching helplessly as his 5 year-old brother died of typhus and his mother slid into madness, Aisic escaped with the help of a Jewish organization called Save the Children. They would pay off the German and Polish guards and send out 40-50 kids. After that, you were on your own. Aisic hadn’t wanted to leave his mother, but she pushed him out to save his life.
After 2 full nights of walking, he arrived at the home of a family friend who agreed to take him in. He hid out in a barn for several months, studying a book of Catholic prayers the man had given him. “Somehow I knew those prayers would save my life,” he says.
After some neighbors became suspicious, Aisic was forced to leave. He arrived in a village named Goschyn one Sunday morning.
And where was a little boy like me going to go on a Sunday morning?” he asks, “I went to church.” Because of his blond hair and blue eyes, Aisic was able to blend in with the congregation. And when the children rose and made their way to confession, he followed right along. “I knelt down, but I couldn’t confess,” he says. “All I could do was cry. I was paralyzed. At that moment I thought I might be dead.”
The young priest knew the boy was not Catholic yet showed pity on him. He slid open the confessional window, placed his hand upon Hirsch’s head. “I’ll never forget the words he said to me,” Aisic remembers.
He said, “Listen, this world will not go on forever. It will end. One day, you will find all of your loved ones again.”
“That priest was my guardian angel. He lifted my life. It is because of him that I am here today,” says Aisic. The priest gave Aisic identification, a real Polish name, birth certificate, everything. With the priest’s help, Aisic found work on a German farm, where he remained for 3 years until he was liberated by the Russians.
He met and married Riva Schuster in Israel in 1950. In 1962 Aisic and Riva moved to the New York to be nearer family members. They moved to Birmingham in 1992 to be nearer their 2 children and grandchildren.
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Riva Schuster was 7 years old in 1941 when the Germans occupied her village of Novaseletz in what was then Bessarabia (eastern Romania, today part of the Ukraine). Her dad, Joseph, made fur clothing. She had an older and a younger brother and her mother’s parents lived with the family. Her dad’s family lived in nearby Chotin.
One day a gentile friend warned the family that trouble was coming to the village. Riva’s mom packed some food and the family fled through the forest toward Chotin. They never arrived. They were captured on the road a few days later and marched to Sukarein where the family was forced into cattle cars. At this point Riva was separated from her family. The train arrived at a camp in Moghilev (on the border between the Soviet Republic of Ukraine and the Romanian province of Bessarabia).
The prisoners were to be ferried across the Dniester River, but those crossing at night often drowned. Riva, fortunately, crossed in the daylight and made it safely across, ultimately arriving at a camp in Luchinetz. Riva arrived hungry, with malaria, typhus and lice. Her feet were frozen and bleeding. At the camp, she saw her mother being beaten with a rifle, trying to resist the Germans taking away her father.
While in the camp, the partisans came one night and rescued a number of the girls, among them was Riva. A man told her to “play dead” and he put her in a wagon of hay, taking her to a convent in Tulchin. Here Riva and the other girls were placed in the care of the nuns who put her all alone in a 6 foot square
bunker from 1943-1945. The nuns came in only every few days with bread and pork. By this time she had no teeth. There were rats and mice that would eat any leftover food. There was only her blanket, which was used for everything.
In 1945, the nuns opened the door and told her to go. Riva could hardly walk so they carried her to the road and left her. Some other survivors picked Riva up and carried her to Chernovitz where she was handed over to the Red Cross. One day her dad showed up and she hardly recognized him. He had been captured and placed in a work camp. He had run away, but was recaptured. She eventually found her mother and two brothers.
In 1946, Riva got on a boat to Palestine. The English captured her ship and the passengers were taken to refugee camps in Cypress from 1946-1948. She came to Israel in 1948 at the age of 15.
In Israel, Riva met her husband Aisic Hirsch, also a survivor. They were engaged within a year and married in 1950. In 1962 Riva and Aisic moved to the New York to be nearer family members. They moved to Birmingham in 1992 to be nearer their 2 children and 4 grandchildren.
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Max Steinmetz was born in Transylvania, Romania. He was the eldest of 3 children. There was a younger brother and sister. His father died when he was very young. Even as a young child he recalls religious discrimination, particularly against Jews, and even some non-Jews.
In June of 1941, after a brief period of nominal neutrality, Romania joined the Axis powers.
Max was 16 years old, when in late 1941, the Germans rounded up the Jews and marched them to an abandoned brick factory, their ghetto for 6 months. They could bring only what they could carry. A community kitchen served soup for lunch and dinner – there was no breakfast.
In late 1943, from the ghetto, the Germans marched them to the railroad station and shoved them into cattle cars. They were told that they were being shipped east to work in factories and farms. They put so many people in each car that if you sat down you could not get up. If you stood up, you could not sit down. They gave each person a half loaf of bread and each car a bucket of water. The train traveled for 3 nights and 4 days in the blazing sun. When the train arrived at Auschwitz, 25% of the passengers were dead.
On the train platform at Auschwitz, Max met face to face with Dr. Josef Mengele, "the Angel of Death" who spared Max and his brother’s life. His mother, step-father and younger sister were sent to the extermination chambers, Max and his brother, Henry, were sent to slave labor.
Max and his brother were imprisoned at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) for a few weeks and then were transferred to Dachau. After a short stay at Dachau they were taken by truck to a small satellite camp called Landsberg/Kaufering. Here they built airplanes for Messerschmitt, built roads, dug tunnels and trenches, and cleared debris from the railroad station in Munich after the bombings by Allied Air Forces. The daily ration was a half loaf of bread and a canteen with black coffee. It was here, on February 4, 1945, that Max’s younger brother died of starvation.
Ten days before liberation by the American Army, many thousands of prisoners were marched to the Tyrolean Mountains to dig trenches and ditches in an effort to deter the advancing American troops. By this time, Max was sick and hallucinating. After dark one evening, Max broke away and escaped to a farm house. The lady of the house’s husband was an SS officer who was off at war. She took him in even though he was filthy and emaciated (at 6’1”, he weighed only 80 pounds). She allowed him to enter and provided him with food, a bath (the first in 3 years) and a place to sleep. She even went to the doctor for medicines.
Max was liberated by the Allied forces on May 2, 1945. He says that he was motivated to stay alive in order to see the Germans lose the war and have one good meal.
Max remained in the hospital for a few months after the war. He then checked into a Displaced Persons (DP) Camp. He applied for a U.S. Visa in 1946 and it was approved in 1948.
Max came to the United States in 1948, working in the boat’s
kitchen to pay his way. When he arrived in New York he
worked for $.24/hour. After brief locations in Denver and
Albuquerque, he moved to Birmingham in 1955. In 1962 he
married his wife Betty. Max is a retired clothing
executive. He and his wife have three children and six grandchildren.
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Jack Bass was born in Berncastel, Germany in the 1923. He remembers antisemitism in Germany long before Adolf Hitler came to power. Even in pre-school he recalls being called a “dirty Jew.” He also remembers being forced to study German poetry full of antisemitic philosophy.
After his Father's death in 1932, he and his mother moved to Cologne, Berlin and ultimately Trier, near the Luxembourg border. Jews were persecuted from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. There was a boycott of Jewish business, Jewish art was banned, and Jewish musicians were silenced.
In 1942, at age 19, he and his family were arrested. Jack was separated from his mother and put in a railroad cattle car for the torturous ride to Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, prisoners were divided into two lines. One line was mostly made up of the elderly and sick. They were herded off by the SS to the gas chambers.
Jack, because he was young and strong, was selected for slave labor. He built factories for the German army. After working all day, Bass has said that his hair would be white from the ashes form the crematorium that constantly fell through the air like snow.
Prisoners were beaten regularly. They were fed a watery soup made of rotten vegetables. They were also given bread, which was not really bread at all. It was a compressed mixture of oats and sawdust he said.
The prisoners battled typhus, dysentery, fleas and lice. Because the water was red and contaminated with what some said was blood, Jack said he held hot peppers in his mouth to make himself salivate. That is what he drank. It is a wonder anyone survived at all.
He remained in the camp for about two years where he worked in the "fields of human hair" (shaven off incoming prisoners), sorting it to ship to Germany to make mattresses. Jack was also kept in captivity at Dachau and a satellite camp of Dachau known as Mühldorf.
As the Allies approached the concentration camp, the prisoners were evacuated. American troops rescued Jack Bass on May 8, 1945, at which time he weighed only 60 pounds.
During such a horrendous experience, many people would cling to their faith, but Jack has said that his grasp on God weakened. He has said that he couldn’t understand how so many pious Jews died, and I was there, not a strong believer, and I survived.
Once liberated, Jack took various jobs in Bavaria. He found a first cousin residing in the United States who sponsored his immigration, and he arrived in New York in 1947. At the time Bass came to America, he said he could not have lived in the South. The Jim Crow Laws were constant reminders of the persecution he had received in Germany. Jack and his wife Phyllis moved to Adamsville in 1994. He has two daughters, two grandsons, and three great grandchildren.
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A special presentation created by Mike Dodson in 2005
for a senior class at John Carroll Catholic High School.
Click here to begin the presentation.
When the "File Download" window opens, click "Open."
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Martin Aaron
was born in 1929 and grew up in Sapinta, Romania. The Hungarians occupied part of
Romania in 1940. After the Hungarian occupation, conditions became harsh for the Jewish community. Jews were not allowed to attend school, and Jewish businesses were confiscated. Travel from town to town was prohibited without special permission.
In 1944, when Martin was 15 years old, the Sapinta Jewish community was taken to a ghetto in Tyachev, Czechoslovakia. In the Tyachev Ghetto, Jewish people from surrounding areas were crowded into a small area. Several families were forced to live in one house. Food was scarce, and people were near starvation.
From the ghetto, Martin and his family,
including parents, three brother and two sisters, were crowded into cattle
railroad cars and, after several days with very little food and water, were taken to Auschwitz. The family was separated immediately, and Martin never saw his parents,
two sisters, and two of his brothers again.
From Auschwitz, Martin and his older brother, along with a group
of other young men, were put into a railroad car and taken to a concentration camp in Bunzlau, Germany. Bunzlau was a forced labor camp where prisoners worked under extremely harsh conditions. Their primary job was construction of concrete foundations for prefabricated factories where German military equipment was repaired.
Martin was given a concentration camp number, 46006. When
Martin arrived at Bunzlau, he found many Jewish prisoners from
Poland who had been there several years.
In 1945, the Nazis, fleeing rapidly approaching liberation armies, took Martin and a number of other prisoners from Bunzlau and marched them for several weeks through Gurlitz, Leipzig, and finally to Nordhausen. Martin's brother,
and some of the other prisoners, were left behind at Bunzlau and
were liberated shortly afterward by the Soviet Army. In Nordhausen, Martin was put on a train that took him to Bergen-Belsen. He was in
an extremely frail condition, so weak that he could not stand, and skeletal in appearance. After being in Bergen-Belsen for a few days, the German guards disappeared and on April 15, 1945, the British liberated the camp. Many thousands of people were dead at the camp, and many more died after the liberation from the effects of starvation and disease.
Martin remained in Bergen-Belen, which was organized into a Displaced Persons Camp. He stayed there for three years. His brother, who also survived, went back to Sapinta,
and finding no Jewish survivors there, immigrated to Israel. He died shortly
thereafter, due to health problems resulting from the concentration camps.
In 1948, Martin was able to locate relatives in New York City and came to the United States to be near them. A friend that Martin had met in Bergen-Belsen befriended him and helped Martin to obtain a Social Security card and two weeks later, Martin found employment at Mobet Sportswear Company in Manhattan, making sports jackets. He registered for the draft, and was inducted into the United States Army in 1950 during the Korean War. He received his basic training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma,
and was eventually stationed at Fort McClellan, Alabama.
In 1952 he was discharged from the army. Martin settled in Birmingham, Alabama. He obtained his first job at U.S. Pipe and Foundry. In 1953 he married a Birmingham girl, Sylvia Gerber. Later he obtained employment at Berman Brothers Iron and Metal Company where he remained for thirty-five years. After the death of his first wife in 1967, Martin married the former Shirley Beck Zalla in 1974. They have two children and four grandchildren.
Martin has been a member of Knesseth Israel Congregation since 1953.
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Sinzenich,
Germany
Ilse and Ruth Scheuer were born in 1924 and 1927
in Sinzenich, Germany, a small farming town near Cologne with
about twelve Jewish families. They had an older brother Ernst.
The family kept kosher, went to synagogue and the children
attended Hebrew School. Their father was a cattle dealer and
ran a kosher slaughterhouse. He had two sisters and a brother.
Their mother was one of eight children. All of the extended
family lived nearby so they visited often. Life was comfortable
until 1933 when Hitler came to power.
Ilse, Ruth and
their cousin were the only Jewish kids in the public school.
They were taunted with Jewish slurs and placed in the last row
in the classroom. Children would throw stones and spit at them,
calling them “dirty Jews.” Because of these unbearable
conditions, the girls were placed in a private Dominican school
in 1934 and remained there until Kristallnacht in
November 1938.
During the
events of Kristallnacht, Ruth left home with her aunt and
cousins and fled on foot to the neighboring city of Zulpich to
stay with a Jewish friend. Ilse was not home that night as she
worked away from home. Upon returning the next day, they found
couches and pillows ripped apart and many possessions stolen,
including a watch that Ruth’s father had given her on her 10th
birthday. Many Jewish men were arrested that night, but their
father escaped over the border to Holland where their brother
had been going to school and living with their maternal
grandmother since 1936. After Kristallnacht, Ruth was
sent with her cousin to Cologne to live with a distant relative
and to go to a Jewish school.
Holland
(1939)
Mr. Scheuer was
interned in Holland, as were many of the recent illegal
immigrants from Germany. He could be freed if he received
papers to emigrate out of Holland.
In late August,
1939, the family was granted Visa’s to England and eventually
America. The plan was for Ilse, Ruth and their mother to travel
from Germany to Holland, to stay briefly with relatives, link up
with their brother and father, and flee to England. Within days
of their arrival in Holland, World War II broke out and the
borders were closed into England so the family stayed on in
Holland. All, except their father, moved in with their
grandmother. Ruth went to a wonderful Montessori school
established by Kees Boeke where she learned Dutch and English.
Ilse was employed, working in a household.
The Nazis took
over Holland in May 1940, and the papers that would have helped
get them to America were destroyed in the bombing of Rotterdam.
Mr. Scheuer was moved to the refugee/transit camp of Westerbork
where he was given an administrative position. The girls even
visited their father there several times.
Westerbork
(1942)
In 1942, the
Jews of Holland were forced to register with the Nazis and mark
their clothes with the Star of David. All of the Jews had a
time limit to report to Camp Westerbork. Thousands of Jews were
sent quickly to different camps. Because their father worked in
Westerbork, Ilse, Ruth, their brother and mother got jobs there
as well.
The parents
lived in a barrack with rooms containing beds and a burner to
cook. The sisters lived in a separate barrack with about 20
girls. Because Mr. Scheuer was connected with the kitchen, they
had enough to eat. Ernst worked as engineer. Ilse and Ruth
worked in a household. They were permitted to walk out of camp
with an ID. It wasn’t a bad time.
Every Monday
morning 1,000 people were sent out by train to the unknown.
Lists were posted on Sunday evenings. In January 1944, Ernst
was arrested and sent to prison for not removing his cap. He
was to be sent out on the next Monday’s transport. The family
decided that if one went, they would all go. Because Mr.
Scheuer had fought in World War I and had received an Iron
Cross, the family was sent to the so-called model ghetto/camp at
Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia rather than to a camp in
Poland. They each brought one suitcase.
Theresienstadt (January 1944)
The train ride
took 2-3 days. They lived in big buildings with the men and
women separated. Each was appointed a job. Ruth worked as a
nurse’s aid.
The family hoped
the war would end while they were there. They had no idea what
was happening. They stayed until mid-February.
Auschwitz II
(Birkenau) (February 1944)
The family was
transported on a cattle train to Auschwitz. There were about
50-60 people in their train car. They got some food to last a
few days and stopped only once for water. There was a pail in
the corner for waste. “To this day when I hear the whistle of a
train, it makes me shriek,” Ilse said on her 1996 video tape for
Steven Spielberg’s “Survivors of the Shoah” project.
Upon arrival,
the men and women were separated. Their belongings were thrown
onto mounds and they were told they would get them back later.
In a little house nearby they got undressed, and jewelry and
glasses were taken. People warned their mother to keep her
mouth closed because of gold fillings. They were given towels
and went into a shower which they later realized could have been
a gas chamber. All of the prisoners were given striped clothes,
a bowl and a tattoo.
Food was a clear
soup, with occasional potatoes and some black bread. Every
morning and every night they were counted. If anyone was
unaccounted for, they had to find them. For punishment they had
to crouch for hours. During the day Ruth and her mother did
nothing; they stayed in the barrack unless called out to be
counted. Ilse sewed bands for rifles. She got an extra piece
of bread for this and gave it to their brother or father because
she said men needed more food. Ilse’s barrack had a band the
performed, so they got extra bread for this too.
On one occasion,
the girls saw their father and brother next to the women’s
compound. He gave them the address of a cousin in America and
some papers that said they had money in America. He blessed the
girls and that was the last they saw of him.
One day, the
female prisoners were called before the SS for a selection. The
women had to undress down to their underpants and walk in front
of the SS. People were being directed to the left and the
right. Noticing that those on the left looked healthier, Ilse
and Ruth jumped to the left side of those already inspected.
What luck, they were selected for work. It was during this
selection, that the girls were separated from their mother. She
somehow got ahead of them and was never seen again. Her
ultimate fate is unclear. It is assumed that she was sent to
work and died.
Sometime later,
the girls were sent to Auschwitz I where they were placed in a
compound with Russian POW’s. Here they had to carry bricks for
3-4 hours from one end of compound to the other. They were
located close to ovens, saw the mountains of shoes, and for the
first time realized what was going on.
Around June
1944, the girls were sent by train to Stutthof where they slept
outside and labored building buildings.
Praust,
Poland (mid-summer 1944)
The girls were
transported by truck to Praust in northern Poland with about 50
other girls. Here they were housed with about 800 girls, mostly
from Hungary, some of whom they knew. They labored clearing
runways for planes, developing severe blisters in the summer
heat and frostbite in the winter cold.
One day, a girl
from Vienna asked Ilse to throw a letter to the French
prisoners. Unfortunately, the SS intercepted the letter. When
asked who did it, Ilse turned herself in to prevent punishment
of the entire group of girls. Ilse was beaten that night with a
switch until she fainted and then had to stand in front of the
barbed wire with her hands up and a bayonet at her back for
hours. She came back to the barracks and collapsed. Unable to
work the next day, Ruth worked even harder to cover for her. If
Ilse had gone to sick bay, she might not have come out.
In October, the
girls were given a blanket which they proceeded to cut and make
slacks. Their shoes had wooden soles with material on top, so
they would put newspaper in them to cushion the soles. The
girls would talk and sing at night. On Yom Kippur, the girls
fasted and saved their bread under their pillow. In the
morning, the bread was gone – stolen.
Death March
(February 1945)
In February
1945, as the Russians approached, 800 girls were taken on a
Death March from Praust toward the Baltic Sea. If you stopped
walking, you would be shot. After walking for about one week,
the girls were put in a barn. Many had typhoid fever, there was
not enough food, they were skin and bones, and many could not
walk. Many girls died in that barn.
In one incident,
Ruth was standing outside the barn when an SS woman attempted to
hit a girl and mistakenly hit Ruth in the chest. This wound got
infected and Ruth eventually had surgery after the war because
of this. The SS woman said she had never noticed what beautiful
eyes Ruth had. Ruth is glad she was never noticed because those
that got noticed were taken advantage of, especially by SS men.
One night Ilse
and Ruth tried to escape. They hid behind a wagon until
everyone left, then hid in a stable for the night. The next
morning the SS found them, put them on truck and delivered them
to their group. Luckily they were not shot. The Death March
started with 800 girls; only 50 survived.
Liberation
(mid-March 1945)
The night before
they were liberated, the girls were marched toward the Baltic
Sea. Along the way they saw a sign that said 4 km. to the
Baltic Sea. It was then that the girls realized the intention
of the SS - to drown them in the Sea. In the meantime, the
Russian troops were rapidly approaching and the SS, fearing
their own capture, abandoned their female prisoners. Left to
die on the side of the road, the girls were free from the SS.
Ilse & Ruth
walked through some fields to the first farmhouse they found.
To their dismay, SS troops guarding some French soldiers
answered the door. Figuring the two girls would die by morning,
the SS took no interest in them. The girls fell asleep sitting
on the floor and the next morning the house was empty. The
Russians had come through and everyone left.
Ilse and Ruth
changed their clothes and hid their lice-ridden clothes under
bed. “This is what they deserved.” For the first time they
actually looked at each other and commented on how horrible they
looked.
On the street
they encountered a Russian soldier who connected them to a
Jewish soldier who spoke Yiddish. He took them to Russian HQ.
The Jewish soldier was a major in the army and a doctor. He had
the girls stay with the troops for a few days. He even offered
to send them to Russia where his wife, a dancer, would care for
them. Ultimately the soldiers had to leave. The girls were
told that the Polish authorities would find them, but no one
came for days. The girls were too ill to even get water.
Possessing a razor, the girls contemplated suicide. Considering
the possibility that family members may have survived, they
decided to search. Hope kept them alive. That day or the next
they were found. (Ilse and Ruth never found their brother. He
died at Bergen-Belsen three weeks before liberation.)
Putzig,
Poland
The girls were
transported to a hospital in Putzig run by nuns. Ruth had her
hair shaved off because of the lice. Ilse’s was already short.
Ilse knitted for the nurses so Ruth could get sugar to take with
the bitter medicine she was taking for an infection in her chest
(from a previous beating by an SS women outside the barn). Ruth
also had Typhus and Typhoid. Here, both girls healed and gained
weight.
To Krakow
then Prague (June/July 1945)
The girls were
transferred to a Russian hospital in Krakow for several weeks.
Wanting to get away from the Russians, they sought out the
railroad station and left for Prague. It was a coal train –
they were stowaways.
At the railroad
station in Prague they were directed to the Red Cross where they
got a little money and clothes. They were told by the Jewish
underground in Prague (which was Russian occupied) that they had
to get out before the Russians sealed the borders. When they
discovered that the Dutch army was in Pilsen, they knew where
they would go. All along they did not want to go to DP camp
because they had heard rumors that some DP’s were taken to
Russia. Their number on their arm was their train fare
throughout Europe.
Pilsen,
Czechoslovakia to Bamberg, Germany
The Dutch army
in Pilsen kept them a few weeks, but told them they had to get
proper documentation in Bamberg, Germany in order to get back to
Holland. In Bamberg, they received more medical care as well as
the papers they needed. They caught a train to Holland.
Utrecht,
Holland (July 1945)
The girls came
to Utrecht since this was the closest train station to their
previous home of Belthoven. They asked the station manager if
there were any Jewish people left, and he informed them that the
Jewish synagogue had just opened and that the caretaker would be
able to tell them.
The caretaker
informed them that their aunt and uncle (Annie & Robert Daniel –
their mother’s brother) had survived by hiding in an attic.
Annie had been the daughter of the head Rabbi in Holland. Annie
and Robert had just rented a house directly across from where
the girls had been sitting since 7:00 am. The girls walked over
to the house. Their uncle did not even recognize them.
Another aunt and
uncle (Martha & Edmund Stein – Martha was their mother’s younger
sister) had also survived by hiding near Amsterdam on a farm.
In their case, their relationship with the people who hid them
was quite strained.
Dutch girls who
had associated with German soldiers had their heads shaved as a
mark of scorn. Ruth and Ilse also had shaved heads (because of
lice) and had to explain that they had not associated with
German soldiers.
The girls lived
with Annie and Robert for a year, earning money by helping a
Jewish seamstress. It was here that their life was
re-established.
To America
(July 1946)
Before their
father had died, in preparation for the war, he had arranged
with cousins in Omaha and Brooklyn to sponsor the girls for
immigration. Fulfilling their father’s wish, Ilse and Ruth
traveled to the United States without knowing the language or
the culture.
They arrived in
Mobile, AL in July 1946 on a cement freighter. In Mobile, the
Kaufman family took them in for the night (not sure how). They
were headed to cousins in Omaha. They stayed only a few weeks in
Omaha until they accepted another cousin’s invitation to come to
Brooklyn. Here the girls worked in a glove factory and learned
English in night school and at the movies.
In 1948, on a
holiday to San Francisco, Ilse and Ruth stopped in Omaha to
visit cousins. It was here that Ruth met her future husband,
Walter Siegler, a German-born Jew whose parents had been
friendly with her own in Europe. In February 1949, Ruth and
Walter were married and moved to St. Joseph, Missouri where
Walter had family. In 1960, they moved to Birmingham to be
closer to Ilse. Walter worked in a shoe store. Ruth lost her
husband to a heart attack in 1968 and had to raise their three
children alone. She currently works at Gus Mayer and has 7
grandchildren.
In the meantime, Ilse met her
husband in New York, also named Walter, and also a German-born
Jew. They were married in Birmingham in January 1949. Together
they opened a clothing store in Homewood, Penny Palmer, which
lasted until 1986. Ilse is also a widow and currently spends
her time doing volunteer work. She has one surviving child and
5 grandchildren.
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