The Holocaust Stories

It is extremely hard to believe what happened in the holocaust. We hear death tolls and statistical information that overwhelms and just washes over us because it is difficult for us to comprehend an atrocity of this nature. I believe that for us to understand it we have to hear first-hand accounts from people who were really there and saw all these atrocities going on. However, I also believe that it is important to know the death tolls and statistical information before hearing the stories to fully appreciate them. Which is why I am now going to give some background information on the holocaust.

The Nazi holocaust lasted from 1938-1945 and resulted in an estimated 6,000,000 deaths (The History Place 1). The Jews of Europe were the main victims of the holocaust, or as the Nazi’s called it, the final solution of the Jewish question(The Holocaust 1). It all started when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 by blaming Jews for economic hardships and promising to fix them. By 1935 the Nuremberg laws were passed essentially eliminating Jews from German society by removing them from schools, banning them from professions, and forbidding marriage between a Jew and non-Jew. In March of 1938 Hitler annexed Austria and immediately began the same treatment to the Jewish community there (1).

The official beginning of the holocaust was the Night of Broken Glass, also called Kristallnacht, which occurred on November 9, 1938 (The History Place 1). A young Jewish man killed Ernst Von Rath, a German embassy official, because of the inhumane treatment of his parents by the Germans. In retaliation the Nazis killed 90 Jews, burned 500 synagogues, and took 25,000 Jewish men to concentration camps (1).

In September of 1939, Hitler officially began World War II by invading Poland, a country home to over three million Jews. The Nazis quickly defeated Poland and rounded up the Jews into over crowded ghettos where tens of thousands died from disease and hunger (The History Place 2).

Mass murder on an unprecedented scale began in 1942. Jews all over were brought by train to different death camps. They were then deceived by the Nazis who would tell them to remember where they put their clothes, or give them bars of soap so they would believe they were taking showers when in actuality they were being sent to gas chambers and their deaths. Then Jews that worked in the concentration camps would have to sift through the dead bodies and clothes for valuables and then put their corpses in huge fire pits or crematory ovens ( The History Place 4).

By 1944, the war was starting to look bad for Hitler as he was losing on all fronts to the allies. From May15 to July 9 over 430,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz. During this time Auschwitz was killing and cremating 9,000 Jews a day (The History Place 6). On July 24 the first camp, Majdanek, was liberated. Hitler continued the extermination and sent camp inmates close to the front on death marches to interior camps where most dropped dead or were shot by SS officers. It took until the spring of 1945 until all the camps were liberated and the full horror of what had been done viewed. On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide and his followers collapsed ( The History Place 7).

The first story I want to talk about is Yettie Mendels. Mendels was married to a young Jewish man named Bob Wolf. Wolf was an aeronautic electronics specialist, however when the Nazis forced professional Jews out he became an electrician in a Jewish old-age home where he and Mendels lived.

In 1942 Mendels was sent a letter from German authorities telling her to report to a train station. Mendels pretended like she never got the letter and went on with her life. In October of 1942 Mendels got a letter form her parents saying that they had been rounded up and brought to Westerbork concentration camp. Soon she got another letter, this time from her eldest sister, saying that she and her family as well as their brother and his family had been caught and also sent to Westerbork. She stopped receiving letters and later found out they were all exterminated.

By the end of the year the Germans ordered the Jewish old-age home where Mendels and her husband were living to move to a nearby ghetto. She then received a tip from a friend saying that everyone in the ghetto was going to be sent to Westerbork. The friend said that she could get them out but they needed to go separate to avoid suspicion. She took Mendels out one day, and the next day when she went back for Mendels husband she found an empty ghetto. Much later Mendels found out her husband had been sent to Westerbork, then Sobibor, where he died.

“I didn’t know what happened to my parents, to my brothers and sisters, to my husband. You can’t imagine what it’s like-utterly impossible” (Mendels 3).

The next story I want to tell you about is Solomon Radasky’s. Radasky had a nice life making fur coats in Warsaw. One morning the Nazi’s caught him walking in the street and forced him to work with a lot of other people clearing snow from the railroad tracks. Their job was to keep the trains running.

When Radasky returned to the ghetto he found out that his mother and older sister had been shot because when the Nazis asked his mother for jewelry and furs she said she had none. In April of 1942 his father was killed for smuggling bread and potatoes into the ghetto.

On July 22, 1942, Radasky was deported to Majdanek. He never saw his family again. At Majdanek he did dirty field work. After a couple days some people just couldn’t take it and collapsed and if they couldn’t get up they were shot. When the day was over the dead bodies had to be carried back to camp. “If 1,000 went out to work, 1,000 had to come back” (Radasky 3). One day an officer saw that somebody was smoking. When he asked who it was they didn’t answer. He told them he was going to hang ten of them if nobody told them who was smoking. Radasky was in the group of ten. Before the officer could kick the bench out from underneath them a soldier came and said he had papers for the release of 750 people to be brought to a different camp. Luckily for Radasky he was one of them.

Radasky was then put on a train for two nights and a day with no food or water. When he got off the train he saw that he had arrived at Auschwitz. There was a selection and some of them were machine gunned. He was soon transferred to Buna where he dug sand up, then was forced to push carts of the sand to Birkenau to cover the ashes of the dead coming from the crematoria.

“I saw when the transports came. I saw the people who were going in, who to the right and who to the left. I saw the people going to the real showers, and I saw the people going to the gas. In August and September of 1944 I saw them throw living children into the crematorium. They would grab them by an arm and a leg and throw them in .”(Radasky 7).

Radasky was sent out from Auschwitz at the beginning of the liquidation on January 18, 1945. Nine days later Auschwitz was liberated. While marching he could look back and see the soldiers shooting anyone that fell. Radasky arrived at Dachau on the 26th of April, and was liberated on May 1st. When they were rescued, the Americans told them their stomachs had shrunk so much that they should only eat toast until it was stretched out. Out of the 78 people in Radasky’s family he was the only one to survive (Radasky 7).

The last story I am going to tell you is one of a Polish Jew named Joseph Sher. Sher said that when the German army invaded they made all the male Jews between 15 and 80 gather in the market. The sun was hot and there was no food or water. The Nazis made them lie face down on the street and shot every tenth or twelfth man to scare them. “This is when we found out what Hitler means” (Sher 2). Then the Germans burned down the synagogue, made a ghetto, and forced them to wear the yellow star on their arms. “We felt the way a dog feels” (2).

A friend of Shers told him about other Jews fleeing to Russia. When Sher and his friend tried they were turned back at the border along with thousands of other Jews. Shortly after he returned to his hometown the Nazis took 1,000 Jewish men from there, including Sher, to help build a highway. They packed them all in cattle cars and traveled to the place where they were going to build the highway. Out of the 1,000 only three survived (Sher 4).

Once he arrived he joined other Jews that had been brought there to help build the highway. They slept in lice infested barns covered in straw. Many scratched at their bodies and ended up with deadly infections. Their toilet was a big ditch out in the open. Some of the guards would shoot at them as they tried to go to the bathroom. If you got shot you fell in (Sher 4).

Sher survived because of two German Jews he had known back in his hometown. They put him in bandages and took him to the infirmary. Then they took off the bandages and gave him a train ticket home. Sher says he has no idea how they did it.

Soon after Sher had returned home to his ghetto, the Germans started the deportation of it. When the Nazi’s came to their house Sher’s grandma said she was 92 years old and asked to be left alone. They shot her but did not kill her. They would not waste a bullet to put her out of her misery (Sher 6).

Fortunately for Sher his brother knew someone that let him and nine other people of his choice stay and work in a factory under German control but safe. He was liberated January 1945.

There are countless other survivor stories out there with just as much pain and suffering, and some with more. Shep Zitler had a family of twelve. When he returned home he found out all had been killed except for one of his sisters. Jeannine Burk’s parents paid for her to live with a German lady until the holocaust was over. During the two years she lived there she could not do anything to jeopardize being caught including playing outside. Both of her parents were killed at concentration camps. These stories are just a few.

The stories in this paper are all told with a purpose. Most of the authors did not enjoy writing them as they express in their telling of them. Put in their shoes I do not believe I would like to relive those events either. They tell their stories because they feel it is their moral obligation to let the world know what happened so that it will never happen again.

Reference:

• holocaustsurvivors.org