The Redhead of Auschwitz. A True Story

by Nechama Birnbaum

Something tells me not to go, not to follow them—to stay right where I am—but as my feet move against the protest of my mind, I realize I do not have a choice. My choice fell away from me along with my dress. It is now in the hands of the soldiers who touched us.

It looks like God took a blanket from heaven and draped it over us to tuck us in. The blanket is sparkling with a million little diamonds, and no one has gone out to ruin it yet.

But he is my strong Zaidy, I think. Nothing really bad can happen to him. He will get through this, and we will all be ok.

He is the father I didn’t have, the sun of my world, he is the deepest love I have ever known.

I wonder why I am the one to be found right here, listening to the world sing its sweet song. Even though I have no answers—and sometimes the sadness in my heart feels like it will pull me down and bury me—I still feel a strange and beautiful peace in where I am right now, and I know that everything is going to be OK.

“All destruction comes from thinking about others as different than you. To be cruel to someone, you cannot think of them as yourself. So, we make them a stranger in our eyes. As if we don’t all have the same blood in our veins, as if we don’t breathe the same air. No one can be cruel unless they really view someone as

different but that rips the world apart. We cannot be different. We are all part of the same God. We are never alone.”

the power of free choice. You choose what you want to be.”

“Think of it as the greatest gift of all. You don’t wait to see what kind of life you lived or what kind of person you became, you choose for yourself no matter what you are going through. You don’t wait for life to happen to you, you happen to life. With every move you make you can choose to make it what you want, what you believe in, even if it is the harder choice.”

Even if we don’t realize it, every time we sob, we think of our mothers. It is the most primal part of us that cries to our mothers.

We cannot always prevent the bad, but we also cannot let it overshadow the good.

Evil happens when we judge each other. Evil happens when we put ourselves higher than others. Evil happens when we stand by someone else’s evil and do not speak up.

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”