My Complicated College Career
My two best subjects in high school in Poland were biology and chemistry, so it is no wonder that I decided to study pharmacy, a profession that would combine my scientific abilities and my desire to help people.
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Read reflections and testimonies written by Holocaust survivors in their own words.
Page 42 of 46
An Image that Brings Back a Memory
It was the sixth year of the German occupation of Prague—on a Sunday afternoon in June of 1944. On most Sundays, my mother, Zdenka, and I and my mother’s sister, Olga, and her two children, Gerti, age 12, and Robert, age eight, would visit my Catholic grandparents’ apartment in downtown Prague. The two fathers were missing—both were on “business trips.”
Have I Changed Over Time?
My best remembered early days were unfortunately my years in Nazi Germany.
A Mother’s Lesson for Life
Six months ago, in mid-2023, I suddenly lost much of my hearing. Thanks to the care of my physicians and audiologists, the condition has improved. Still, it has been a life-changing event, which at times has left me anxious and sometimes almost despondent.
In Memoriam: Marty Weiss
I had this premonition that it would happen while I was out of the country. And it did. I was in Tel Aviv when I got the news that Marty, my friend, had only a few days left to live, and I was back in Budapest when I got the note from his daughter, Gail, that Marty was not with us anymore.
Warme Chocola (Hot Chocolate)
When we returned to Holland in 1948 after living in Sweden for two years, we realized that food and goods were still rationed in the Netherlands. You could not just buy the amount you needed or wanted if you did not have the right ration coupons or enough of them.
They Took My Father Away
They took my father away. They came one evening and took him away on a stretcher. Two policemen in blue uniforms bent over the black, blanketed heap And heaved up the poles And opened the door and left.
Monuments
As a Holocaust survivor and volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I think much of the work we do here qualifies as building a kind of monument.
Religious Education
When Sidney and I married in 1965, we decided that if we would have children, we would like to bring them up within the Jewish traditions and religion. We were married in the Liberal Synagogue of Amsterdam.
Ellen
In the spring of 1945, the US Army was closing in on Cologne. I was an intelligence agent, a member of Interrogator Prisoner of War Team no.66, a part of an intelligence unit called T-Force, 12th Army Group, with a mission to follow the infantry into large cities as they were liberated.
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Survivor Reflections and Testimonies
Listen to or read Holocaust survivors’ experiences, told in their own words through oral histories, written testimony, and public programs.