Eva Gallers Story of surviving the holocaust:
"People started to pull out those barbed wires and jumped through those little windows. Even the SS people sat on the rooftop of the train and shot, but everybody took a chance. Whoever could, whoever it was possible to take a chance. Well, my father told us, when the young people started to jump, he said, "You the oldest three"--I was seventeen, and my sister sixteen, my brother fifteen--"You oldest try. Maybe somebody will survive, but we will stay here with the small children, because even if they go out they won't be able to survive." So the parents went with the small children. My sister . . . my brother jumped first, my sister second. Then I jumped, and I landed in a ditch of snow.
They shot after us. They shot . . . they keep on shooting, but the bullet didn't hit me. When I didn't hear anymore the train, I got up. And the first thing I did, I took off my star, and I promised myself never again will I ever wear a star. I went first to look after my sister and brother and found them dead. And I found many corpses . . . many corpses. From that train one of my friends survived, too. She lives in New York. We were two people who survived that train, but many people jumped. Well, after that I survived under an assumed name, and I was caught to work in Germany as a Polish girl. And I worked on a farm, on a German farm, under a false name . . .pretended that I was Catholic and escaped until the end of the war"
(Holocaust Survivors: Audio Gallery - "Escaping the Death Camp Train")
Isak Borenstein's story:
"When I was in camp in Dnepropetrovsk, I was not a Jew. I was over there a Pole in the Russian army. I had a little more freedom than the other 49 Jews was working there. Between the 49 Jews, was 25 men, 24 women. And the last minute when they took them out to kill, what I saw they took them in, in the washateria, undressed them, and put potato sacks on them, just cut out for the head and dressed them up in the potato sacks. They brought them out, and we never saw them again."
(Holocaust Survivors: Audio Gallery - "Dressed up in Potato Sacks")
The only people that knew her name were my
parents. I was a little girl then. They took me to the house--my father
actually--he brought me into the house, and that was the last time I
ever saw my father.
I was hidden for two years. I never went
outside. I was not allowed to go outside because I didn't belong to the
family, and the woman who hid me sacrificed a lot to take me. Because
had the Nazis discovered she was hiding a Jew, whether it was a little
girl or an adult it didn't matter, they would have killed her on the
spot. Of course, as well as me. I was allowed sometimes to go out in
the backyard, but for the most part that was my home for two years.
I was never mistreated--ever! But I also
was never loved, and I really lost a great part of my childhood--simply
because we were Jews.
Jeannine Burk's Story:
Belgium
was supposed to be neutral during the war, but Adolph Hitler ignored
that and invaded Belgium. There was a movement where you could inquire
about hiding Jews...hiding children, and my father did that. He had a
place for my brother to go; he had a place for my sister to go, and he
found this place for me, and he took me on the streetcar to a woman's
house, and the reason that I keep saying "this woman" is I don't know
her name.