Read reflections and testimonies written by Holocaust survivors in their own words.
A few weeks ago, I received a call from a man living in Canada who told me that he is a nephew of Zofia Sawinska, a person who saved me and my family during the Holocaust. He has a lot of documents about his family and how they saved the lives of many more Jews.
All I know about my early life comes from photographs and the stories my mother told me. Yesterday, I received a photograph I had never seen before. It opened a whole new chapter, and it left me stunned and speechless. It is the earliest picture I have of me together with my mother. The photo was one of many I received in an email from an unremembered friend, Arthur Friederizi.
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.
Dini Polak is a lively Dutch woman in her mid-80s who has a debilitating muscle and balance disorder that has kept her in a wheelchair and homebound for ten years, but whose social media presence alone testifies to her avid interest in world affairs, politics, and literature.
Sadly, I have no personal memories of Mima. All I know about her comes from countless photographs of an always serious looking dark-skinned woman with her sleek black hair almost always combed back into a bun, of a few words of Mima’s native languages, Maleis, of a taste for Indonesian cooking, and, of course from the many stories about her that my foster siblings, Dewie, Wille, and Robby, shared with me.
The choice was made, Alone she would travel To a foreign country A new family To safety
Listen to or read Holocaust survivors’ experiences, told in their own words through oral histories, written testimony, and public programs.
