The Redhead of Auschwitz. A True Story

by Nechama Birnbaum

“You never, ever really know who the real person is. People are good at pretending. They are sweet and nice and then when they don’t need you anymore, who knows what they can do. You never actually know a person all the way. People know how to dress their souls up, put some makeup on. They can act polite when everyone is looking but you can never be sure.”

“The whole purpose of this world really is for the next world, you know. This world is the corridor, before the palace. We are supposed to prepare ourselves in the corridor, so we can enjoy the palace. It is what our sages taught us. The next world is for eternity; this world is so fleeting.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

But lately her song has adopted a sort of sadness. She is scared. She knows that there will not be many more years in which this world will have living testimony of what happened. She is saddened by antisemitism—especially by the extreme rise in it now. She is bewildered by the number of people who have no idea of what the Holocaust was. Most of all she is in agony over the way people treat one and other.

The greatest revenge we can inflict is to have tolerance and kindness for ALL peoples, all those that Hitler so strongly stood against.

Evil does not only happen when a person is abnormally bad. Evil happens when good people do not see the good in other people. 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.