When I was a kid, I thought they were rare. Now, I know one - from Auschwitz - and two people who hid out during the holocaust. I have a friend who was born in a DP camp in Europe.
Both of his parents were survivors who lost their families in concentration camps. It sure is S A D.
I met one once, when I was a small boy in Chicago, in the 60’s.
I saw his tatoo. I didn’t know what it meant until years later.
My wife’s grandfather married a holocaust survivor. He has since passed on, but she still lives only a few blocks from us.
In addition, my wife’s grandmother survived the holocaust, but in a different manner. She was a young girl of 9 in Poland in 1939. She got on a train to visit her older married sister in another town. As it turned out, she got on the wrong train and ended up in the Soviet Union. She remained stuck there until the war was over, missing the holocaust by sheer luck (or divine intervention). She went back after the war to find her family. To this day, she has not seen a single member of her family since.
Zev Steinhardt
My family is not Jewish, but my great aunt married a holocaust survivor. Like most of them, he is dead now - nearly six decades have passed since the Nazi death camps were finally closed.
The holocaust struck me more deeply in another way.
As a student, I worked in a law firm. One case concerned the estate of a Jewish woman who died with no near next of kin. The problem was to trace relatives who would be entitled to her property.
I saw her family tree. It started with her four grandparents, then showed all their many descendants, including her. I felt a chill when I saw how many branches of that family tree ended in the 1940s in places like Auschwitz and Belsen.
To be honest, a shiver ran down my back as I typed that last sentence, and that is how the memory affects me. It is frightening to think that there are kids today to whom this is just boring history. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it
Rwanda and Cambodia show that man’s inhumanity to man did not end in 1945 - although it is usually been less well organised than the Nazi death camps.
My 7th grade algebra teacher was a survivor. Great lady. She was just tiny & had this accent & laugh that I can still hear in memory. She was a young girl in Hungary, maybe12 or 14 yrs old, & she lost all of her immediate family in the holocaust; sister, mother & father. She would occasionally take lunch hours & talk in front of a class of students about her experience. & we would listen with fascination, horror, & overwhelming sadness. It was my first hearing of the holocaust really. She also wrote a book about it called ‘My Destiny’. She’ll always have a cozy loved place in my heart.
I’m not sure to which Straight Dope column this refers, and it seems to me like a polling type of thread, so I’m moving it to IMHO.
One of my aunt’s friends is a Polish man who was at Auschwitz.
I met him once. He was one of the nicest guys you’d ever hope to meet. Just really upbeat and friendly. He was showing us pictures, as he and his wife had been back to the camps. My aunt commented that there were no pillows on the bunks. He said, “Patty, what do you think this was-the Holiday Inn?”
That’s hopeful and depressing at the same time… poor thing, finding herself alone in the world at 14.
My maternal grandfather introduced me to a few concentration camp survivors when I was a kid. He had a lot of Jewish friends: in his position as construction supervisor during WWII, he forged identification documents, thus employing Jewish employees, effectively saving them from the horrors of the concentration camps (ironically, the company was even Nazi-controlled and building U-boot docks at the Dutch coast - he looked like a traitor to those around him, but effectively did a lot more than those who condemned him). But a few of the people he introduced to me did end up in the concentration camps - and were lucky to survive.
Although one wonders: if a man is saved from a concentration camp and returned to a scarred life, alone because he lost everyone around him, how can we even speak of “luck”?
“People who hid out during the Holocaust”? I can’t even begin to count them, especially when I interpret that as “People who hid out from the Nazis”.
At times, it boggles the mind when you realise this was just 60 years go.
There was a lady in pottery class that had the tattoo from the concentration camps. She had tried to put it all behind her - she was very young when it all happened. She enjoyed her life in Pasadena, and tried not to think about it too much. But she said she still had dreams about it.
Another friend, Billy (who has since passed away) was one of the soldiers that liberated Buchenwald (sp?). He talked about the bodies he saw, the starving people, the villagers in the nearby German town who didn’t want to believe what was so close to them. The American soldiers took the townspeople up to the camp to see it. The townspeople were all laughing during their walk up to the camp. They weren’t laughing during their walk back from the camp. IIRC, I think the mayor of the town committed suicide soon after. Billy talked often about what he saw there. It made a huge impression on him, for the rest of his life.
I know a Nazi. Parent of one of my friends. Axl is a normal old man, was a POW during the latter part of the war. Sweet and gruff.
Still bugs the shit out of me. My dog took one look at him and shit on the floor. Axl took that as evidence of the superior breeding of his Weimeraner.
I’ve known many during the course of my lifetime. Most, sadly, are now dead.
Some spoke about their experiences, many did not. I’m just glad that they felt safe and comfortable here and that they had some happy times - they sure as shit earned them.
My dad spent over 30 days on a train as a POW during WWII and then about another 60 days in a camp. He doesn’t speak of it very often but he has suffered nightmares from his time there.
There are many stories we’ve heard numerous times: how they fattened all the prisoners up on the boat back to the states (they ate mostly bread and potatos), the guys who tried to escape the camp (they were not successful, were recaptured and given some mighty severe punishment.) and how when he was on the train some people died while they we standing, how he will never forget that smell and how at the same time as the smell was everywhere, there was also his mind that could make that smell be the smell of chocolate or meatloaf or any type of food because there had been none in days or weeks.
In the past 10 years he has reunited with some men that he was in prison with. There aren’t many left, but they are out there.
My father turned 81 on May 6th and sometimes I look at him and know that I could never even begin to comprehend the horrors he has lived through.
My mother, grandmother and grandfather were incarcerated in a Japanese POW camp in north China. I realize, of course, that does not make them holocaust survivors but they had a pretty rough time of it from what I understand. I’ve been trying to find out more about the camp that they were in but I haven’t been able to come up with much.
Some of my great-aunts and -uncles married Holocaust survivors (my great-aunt Gerda is one who’s still living).
I also WOULD have known a number of Holocaust non-survivors. My father’s mother’s family hailed from Kiev, and the ones who hadn’t left at the turn of the century were machine-gunned by their “countrymen.” My mother’s father’s family were from Transylvania, and I don’t think ANY Jews from that area survived the war.
About 16 years ago I was dating a girl, and her mother had been at Auschwitz when she was a young girl. My girlfriend said her mother never really spoke much about it.
During the same time, I worked briefly at a plumbing supply house. One of the guys who worked the front counter (Dave) had been in the holocaust. One of the semi-regular customers (Helmut) was an ex-Nazi. With rotating counter schedules, they didn’t run into each other often, but when they did, man, you could just feel the tension. Dave refused to wait on him whenever he came in. One day Helmut muttered that Dave was one of the ones who “must have gotten away”. I never did like Helmut. Bastard.
My ex-boyfriend’s father is a camp survivor. When he was 11, the Nazis marched into Ukraine and rounded up him and his famiyl; I’m not sure exactly which camp they were in. His mother bribed a guard to let the kids run free; the guard took the bribe and let the kids go, but shot the mother to death in front of their eyes first. My ex’s father spent 4 years hiding out in a barn in Ukraine, where he had to eat rats to survive.
Then the Ukrainina family that was hiding him turned him over to the Nazis again; he never found out why. Luckily, by then the war was almost over, so he managed to survive and reunite with his father and siblings.
Unfortunately, the whole experience left him with a lot of health problems and even more emotional baggage, which he has shared with his wife and son. Basically, he has a huge entitlement mentality; his family should do everything he wants, no matter how unreasonable.
BTW, here in Illinois there is a required Social Studies unit on the Holocaust every year for schoolkids. In our school, that usually meant a survivor would come in and talk about his/her experiences. It certainly gave one a little perspective about what a real problem is!
My grandmother and great-aunt survived Aushwitz. In fact my Grandmother and great-Aunt escaped from the Death March in which the prisoners were rounded up to be shot just before the Russians arrived to free the camps. They were I think 19 and 16 at the time. My Grandma told my father about it on her deathbed – otherwise she NEVER spoke it. Unlike most Poles, my grandmother thought highly of the Russians. Of their 12 brothers and sisters, they were the only 2 that survived. Their whole lives my great-Aunt and Grandmother never got along and were constantly feuding. They lived on opposite side of New York State and saw each other perhaps once in a decade. Needless to say they were awfully screwed up. I believe at least my Grandma got reparations from the German government. Probably both of them did.
My grandfather also survived Aushwitz… he had been previously married with children and they all died. I don’t know that much about it, since he NEVER spoke of it (seeing a trend here?).
My father was born in Germany where my grandparents were trying to sort things out I suppose and find a place to settle. They immigrated when he was 4.
My Grandfather was an upholsterer who did furniture for wealthy people in Manhattan. My grandmother was a seamstress who sewed matching drapes, pillows etc. They pulled themselves up from living in tenements to retiring comfortably in Queens and putting 2 kids through college.
Yep, same deal: my ex’s father never talked about his wartime experiences until my ex had to help him put together an application for German government reparations. Since he obviously didn’t have any docs to confirm his version of events, a mighty convincing affidavit was the only way around the issue. Luckily, it worked, and my ex’s parents are now living on their pitiful SSI check along with the reparations stipend. It makes a big difference to them, though.
I’ve been privileged to meet several survivors while assisting with a Shoah Foundation video history project. Quite an array of personalities and approaches to coping with their memories and scars. I couldn’t help crying during most of the interviews.
Recalling these people and their stories makes me wonder at the extent to which humans are both fragile and practically indestructible; the extent to which we can be selfless and loving; and the horrifying extent to which we can be thoroughly evil.
Both my grandmothers, one grandfather, an uncle. some great aunts and great-uncles, my father-in-law, grandmother-in-law. Some hid, some were in camps. Those are the ones related to me, but I know many more.