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I have always regretted that I was sleepy and didn’t hug him back. I’m sure my father understood I didn’t mean to ignore him, but that is one regret I will have for the rest of my life.
For three weeks, Herta and I spent our days walking around Bratislava, going into shops, visiting churches, and wandering all over waiting for night.
That’s when I understood that we were indeed the last Jews in Bratislava.
So we did. We went to the Slovak police, I gave them my name and our parents’ names, and I said we’d like to join our parents wherever they were. The police were amused, and at first they just laughed.
Finally, one of the policemen arrived and told us where we were going. “You are going to join your parents,” he said, “in Auschwitz.” That was the first time I heard the word Auschwitz. I had no idea it was the largest of Hitler’s concentration camps.
Once, a bomb exploded so close that our train car skidded off the tracks, and we were stuck there for what seemed like forever. Finally, a German soldier slid open the big wooden door and ordered us to get out. “Everyone out!” he yelled. “You are going to be rerouted!”
But it was not Bratislava. And it was not Auschwitz, where we had hoped to rejoin our parents. Soon we would learn that we had been sent to a different concentration camp. This one was called Bergen-Belsen.
At one moment, out of exhaustion or confusion, Herta let go of my hand and wandered away. I turned around—and she was gone.
What could I do to get her attention? I felt I had no choice but to bend down and bite her cheek.
Yet we did manage to keep walking, and at last we arrived at Bergen-Belsen.
Then Herta signed some angry words at me for biting her cheek, and I signed back how terrified I’d been at the thought of losing her.
We carried heavy bags of supplies, scrubbed the barrack floor, and emptied buckets from the latrine. I did everything the Germans told us to do.
My sister and I were in Bergen-Belsen for nearly a year, and it was a terribly lonely time.
The soldiers spoke German, and the German language became identical in my mind with the cruelty of the Nazis. That’s when I started learning Polish.
I really was a pest to Renee because I was so starved for contact with others. Often, she got exhausted from talking to me and I felt so lonely.
Not only did we have to get used to war, which was unbearable—but now we had to get used to peace, which was unbelievable.
ended up attending the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York City.
There were also symbolic gravestones here and there around the grounds, placed after the war by family members to commemorate relatives who perished in the camp. Among them was a stone bearing the names of Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, commissioned by their father.
Herta and I never met Anne Frank, but she became famous all over the world for her diary, which her father had published after the war, in 1947.
the world’s worst catastrophes are often human-made and that the image of our world today as civilized is a myth. We just became more sophisticated at how we go about killing people.
The Holocaust was a tragedy so vast, so immense, that even those who experienced it have a hard time accepting what their eyes have seen.
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University,
