Read reflections and testimonies written by Holocaust survivors in their own words.
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One of Many Tours
November 1, 2013
I did not want to get up that morning because I knew it was very cold outside. I would have a long walk from the Metro to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The hike would entail walking briskly down Independence Avenue, where the wind would surely blow in my face and I would be frozen by the time I got to the Raoul Wallenberg Place entrance of the Museum. I got up anyway because I had committed myself to being one of the tour guides for the 93 members of the Frederick Presbyterian Church who were arriving at the Museum at 9 a.m. that day. Luke, from Visitor Services, had e-mailed me and asked that I participate because he knew me. He had introduced me when I gave presentations to visitors in the Wexner Center, and we had become friends. It was his mother’s church and he was excited to have a survivor tour guide.
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Writing as a Pathway
November 1, 2013
I arrived in the United States on November 11, 1947. I was an unhappy child torn from my second home to come to a new land with family I hardly knew. My sister and I were met in New York by two uncles—one my sister knew from Germany and one an unknown American uncle. I knew neither. So I began my journey to becoming an American and eventually a Holocaust survivor.
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Going Back
November 1, 2013
My long-term memory is full of blanks. I had hoped that revisiting the places of my childhood would help bring back some of the memories, but this has not happened. Until age seven, I lived in Zaleszczyki, Poland (present-day Ukraine), a small historic vacation town on the frontier with Romania. The town was very picturesque and almost completely surrounded by the Dniestr river, which served as the natural border between Poland and Romania.
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The Last Letter
November 1, 2011
The last letter my parents sent from the camps in France arrived in May 1942. My sister, Bertl, held on to this letter and the others from our parents for 68 years. When she came to live in Washington, DC, in 1947, the letters traveled with her. Bertl has held on to the letters through all her moves in the DC area.
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Accepting History: Return to Adelsheim, the Second Time
September 18, 2005
The letter had been sent to Bertl, my sister, by Reinhart Lochmann in September 2000. In his letter he described the special program he was planning to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the deportation of the Jews from Adelsheim and Sennfeld, Germany, to camps in southern France.
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First Impressions Sometimes Lie
September 18, 2005
I stood at the front of the classroom facing my students, who were themselves teachers within the same school district as I was—Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. They had enrolled in the summer in-service class for teachers to study the history of the Holocaust, as well as to learn methods for teaching this history to their own students when they returned to their classrooms the following fall.
