“Get your things. Let’s go,” the policemen ordered. Aaron (then Henri) Cohen, his parents and his younger brother gathered some belongings from their apartment in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and began walking toward the Jewish school, about a mile away.
Guta Peck nee Kasz was sitting on the sole latrine inside her Auschwitz barracks one evening in early September 1944, when a drunken SS soldier picked her up.
Ralph Hakman was hiding in a barely noticeable house, almost a shack, when he was discovered by his mother.
“You remain,” the SS soldier said, pointing at Morris Price — then Moniek Prajs — instructing him to wait in the open truck that had just arrived at Birkenau from the Krakow ghetto.
At 5 o’clock one morning in April 1944, Jean Greenstein — ne Egon Grünstein — heard the bell ringing at the front gate of his family’s home in Velky Sevlus, Czechoslovakia
“Los, los. Alle heraus,” the SS soldiers yelled, whips in hand, as the train doors opened onto the Auschwitz-Birkenau platform.
Gabriella Karin (then Foldes) tightly clasped her Uncle Sandor’s waist as she traveled on the back of his bicycle along the back roads of Slovakia from Malzenice to Bratislava, a 40-mile journey.
Fred Zaidman, who had recently added helping the homeless to his list of volunteer passions, went into action, soon securing a commitment from Bristol Farms for 75 burritos for a breakfast for the homeless that The City School, a charter middle school, was sponsoring on Thanksgiving morning.
“Achtung,” a German officer shouted. “Attention.” Fifteen-year-old Henry Oster, then called Heinz, lined up with his mother in a Lodz ghetto courtyard on a mid-August day in 1944.
Half the people in the cattle car were already dead when the train pulled in after midnight to the station in the Polish city of Oswiecim (Auschwitz).
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