As a Dutch Jewish couple hiding separately from the Nazis, Emmanuel Joels and Hetty van Son were literally drawn together by a comic book of Emmanuel’s romantic invention.
The doorbell rang at 6:45 a.m. on Sept. 1, 1939, waking 17-year-old Fred (then Friedrich) Klein, who was at home in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, on vacation from art school in Prague.
“If he can work, I can work, too,” 9-year-old Paula Lebovics — then Pesa Balter — told herself after her older brother, Josef, 14, left the small, rat-infested room that had served as one of their many hiding places in the defunct brick factory for many weeks, ever since the Ostrowiec ghetto was liquidated on June 10, 1943.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is seeking messages and personal artifacts from Holocaust survivors for a time capsule to be opened on the museum’s 50th anniversary in 2043.
Newly arrived and, at 17, one of the oldest among the 1,000 boys in Birkenau’s Block 22, Jack Lewin – then Yanek Levin – was incensed as he watched the Polish block leader and his Jewish deputy, a man named Wolkowicz, divvy up the bread rations, cutting the small, hard loaves intended for four prisoners into five portions and pocketing the extras.
“Seven, eight, four, five. Write that down,” Dr. Josef Mengele instructed a nearby guard as a naked and painfully thin Klara Wizel — then Iutkovits — stood before the Auschwitz doctor in yet another selection, her drab, gray dress draped over her right arm, her tattooed left arm outstretched.
\”Get out, move,” Nazi and Arrow Cross soldiers shouted in German and Hungarian as they burst into the crowded four-story Swedish safe house in Budapest, Hungary, on Jan. 8, 1945. Marianne Klein — then 13 and called Marika Roth — had escaped to the house only days earlier
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