As soon as the train leaving the Warsaw Ghetto made its first stop, the 100 Jews packed into the cattle car with 19-year-old Sol Liber knew they were headed east to the Treblinka death camp. “Half the train was getting crazy,” said Sol, who recalls standing back from the tiny window in his car to let more air reach his older sisters, Tishel and Shayva, who were fainting.
Doli Offner (now Doli Redner) and her older sister, Lea, stood single file along with a group of young women at Auschwitz as Dr. Josef Mengele walked past, dispatching each with a flick of his thumb to one side or another. Lea was sent to the labor camp line and Doli to the gas chamber. Doli couldn’t move. She daydreamed about being reunited with her mother and let herself be pushed ahead by the other girls, who were crying and shoving as whips cracked down on them. Then, suddenly, she was pulled from her line and moved to Lea’s. Doli didn’t know who saved her life, but at that moment she thought, “If somebody did that for me, I’m not going to give up.”
“You are being relocated to a labor camp,” the Hungarian gendarmes, or police, announced to the Jews of Sopron, Hungary, who had spent the previous two weeks confined to a windowless tobacco factory. Edith Jacobs (née Rosenberger), her parents, three sisters and the other Jews were marched to the train station
The railroad car doors slammed open. “Heraus, heraus,” the German guards screamed. “Get out, get out.” Joseph Aleksander woke abruptly. He had been hallucinating that he was relaxing on green grass next to a bubbling stream. In reality, he lay on the floor of a cattle car crammed with men, women and children, many of them dead from a three-day journey with no food or water and little air.
“Don’t speak, don’t cry. The Germans will hear us, and they will kill us.” Four-year-old Hadasa Cytrynowicz — then Dasha Eisenberg — silently clung to her mother, wrapped in the goose down comforter they had brought with them from Konskie, Poland, to a hut near the Bug River, northeast of Warsaw. Hadasa was frightened.
“Who wants to go home?” the SS soldiers asked the 500 women who had just been delivered to Grünberg/Schlesien, a forced labor subcamp of Gross-Rosen in Lower Silesia. Adela Manheimer, née Kestenberg, an only child who, in her words, was “naïve and upset and sick for my parents,” raised her hand.
“Mommy, mommy.” Five-year-old Betty Hyatt, then Betty Prins, frightened by the unfamiliar low, rumbling noises in the sky, jumped out of bed and ran screaming for her mother. It was early morning on Friday, May 10, 1940, the day she and her father were planning to travel to Holland to visit relatives.
Rumors circulated through Amsterdam’s Jewish community that married men were exempt from labor camp duty. Max Stodel — then known as Mozes or Mauritz — submitted the paperwork necessary to marry his fiancée, Jeannette van Praag.
Dorothy Greenstein — then Devorah Kirszenbaum — was upstairs in her family’s apartment in Otwock, Poland, preparing for her first day of third grade and coaxing her 2-year-old nephew to eat when suddenly the whole house shook. Bombs were falling.
In October 1942, George Berci, then George Bleier, was ordered to report for forced labor. Along with 1,600 young men, the 21-year-old was transported from Budapest to a camp near Bereck, Hungary, near the Romanian border.
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