Born Survivors Quotes

“Over time, Jews were banned from state hospitals and not allowed to travel further than thirty kilometres from their homes. Public parks, playgrounds, rivers, swimming pools, beaches and libraries were placed out of bounds. The names of all Jewish soldiers were scratched off First World War memorials,”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“The more people who know about what happened, the less likely it is to happen again, I hope,’ she said. ‘This is a story which should teach people that it mustn’t happen again.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“We came to hell, and we didn’t know why,”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“Auschwitz was the only camp in the entire Nazi system that tattooed its inmates, a practice it had begun in 1941. Those destined for the gas chambers were never registered or tattooed, which worried any who were unmarked.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“Several thousand inmates remained in the new camps, manufacturing vital goods for the German war effort, but an estimated 58,000 were sent on to forced labour camps further east as part of what the Nazis called the Osttransport”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“On a frosty December morning, with her best handbag, hat, and a small suitcase she handed over the keys to their flat to her maid and asked her to keep their most precious belongings safe there...

Then she joined the disorderly progression of Jews heading for the Veletržní palác. Instead of taking something necessary and useful like tinned fish or packet soup, Anka carried a large hat box tied with string. In it were three dozen of her maid's delicious sugar-coated donuts, [her husband's] favorite treat...

The young bride kept brushing her hair and reapplying her makeup. [The people around her] were even more intrigued when she knelt on the floor in her fine stockings to use her eyelash curlers. "I just wanted to look my best for the man I loved."

A passage about Anka Bergman, a Czech Holocaust survivor, being transferred to the Theresienstadt ghetto ”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors

“Of the more than 200,000 people registered as living in the Łódź ghetto, less than a thousand survived. It was one of the Nazis’ greatest triumphs in the destruction of European Jewry.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“After Anka had scattered her husband’s ashes, she suggested that Eva cremate her too when the time came, even though that was not in the Jewish tradition. ‘Well, it’s how the rest of my family ended up!’ she joked.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“immaculate”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“Then one day she lost her baby.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“The Germans were, after all, one of the world’s most cultured and civilised peoples. The nation that had produced Bach and Goethe, Mozart and Beethoven, Einstein, Nietzsche and Dürer couldn’t possibly create such a monstrous plan – could it?”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“Even then we didn’t realise the deadly danger we were in.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“You don’t give [your home and your country] a thought until it disappears . . . which it did after twenty years and it was the biggest shock.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“We happened to be Jewish and that was that,’ said Anka. ‘It didn’t hinder me in any respect.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“Her dream of returning home to a place of laughter, warmth and beauty, and of being greeted with loving arms, had turned to a nightmare from which there would never be escape. The past was gone and she was in a new kind of camp almost as cruel as anything she had experienced.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“The first twenty years we couldn’t talk about it. For the next twenty years no one wanted to hear about it. Only in the next twenty years did people start asking questions.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“Only 300,000 of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews had survived the war and an estimated 1,500 were murdered in the years after they returned home, many for anti-semitic reasons.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“In six years the Nazis had killed approximately two-thirds of the nine and a half million Jews living in Europe, as well as millions of non-Jews.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“Poland was changed beyond all recognition. With the largest Jewish population on the European continent, it had been at the epicentre of the Holocaust. Poland not only suffered catastrophic damage from aerial bombardment but lost millions of its citizens.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“There were between eight and nine million survivors of the war to settle into Displaced Persons (DP) camps run by the army, or by voluntary agencies such as the Quaker Relief Team, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the Red Cross and the International Refugee Organisation”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“One survivor said that at first their minds couldn’t grasp what that could mean, even though they’d been waiting so long to be saved. They were, she said, ‘too weak and too empty to feel happiness’.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“after 23 April when Churchill, Stalin and Truman had ordered a massive airdrop of leaflets in every language which threatened to ‘relentlessly pursue and punish’ anyone guilty of mistreating prisoners. This, coupled with the fact that Red Army and American forces were almost upon them, meant that the world was close to discovering what had truly been taking place in this scenic region of Austria for the previous six years.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“We stared at each other and it was terrible how we looked – skin and bone skeletons. So dirty and full of lice. We looked dead already.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“As soon as I saw written that which I didn’t want to see – my birth pains started,’ she said. ‘Even if I couldn’t imagine anything else, that was that. It was a fact . . . I was so frightened that I started labour. Mauthausen was in the same category as Auschwitz. Gas chambers, selections – in short, an extermination camp.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“Estimates vary as to how many died in total, but it is thought to be approximately 100,000, of whom more than 30,000 were Jews.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“Aside from being worked to death, there were more than sixty methods of murder catalogued in Mauthausen including beatings, shootings, hangings, medical experiments, injection with petrol, and various forms of torture. The final death toll in the camp complex is unknown, as many prisoners were killed in a mobile van or sent to a nearby castle to be gassed”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“In the evening almost the whole transport received soup and bread. Everybody was crying with happiness and saying, “We came through Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Germany, France and nowhere did anyone see us! Only in Czechoslovakia the people have heart . . . We will never forget Horní Bříza.”’ Klara Löffová said, ‘The whole village came with soup and bread . . . It seemed like a miracle”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“The ghosts of their mothers and of the millions of others who died during the war demand that their stories are told and retold, never to be forgotten. As Hana said, ‘We all try to live our lives as best we can and to fill those shoes that are so empty. In memory of their memories, each new day is a promise.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“Thanks to courage, hope and luck, their babies were the first-ever prisoners of the camps to be given names instead of numbers. In defiance of those darkest of times, their legacy is that they are also inevitably destined to be the last-ever survivors of the Holocaust. For them all, 1945 marked the end of something that would take years to come to terms with. But it also marked the birth of something countless generations would never experience – a new beginning and a chance to live and to love again.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“Another time she came across a mouldy cabbage half-buried in wet mud and, although she knew she could have been shot if she’d been seen picking it up, she was so hungry that she risked it. Although the cabbage stank and was so decomposed that her fingers went straight through it, she ate it whole and claimed nothing had ever tasted so good in her whole life.”
― Wendy Holden, Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope