Among the smells of my childhood were my mother’s goulash and the scent of Shabbat candles. This list represents only a portion of the 1.1 million victims and some survivors of the Auschwitz death camp and is not intended to be viewed as a complete accounting. My sister was sent with my mother, while I went to the opposite side. A doctor escorts a group of Auschwitz survivors from the camp in January 1945. For 17 days we had no water, no food, nothing. Jewish children were thrown out of Hungarian schools, so right away we had no choice but to concentrate on hunkering down and trying not to bring attention to ourselves. Mindu Hornick, 13, peered through a crack in the door of her stopped cattle car and read a name: Auschwitz. Despite the hardship I was doing OK compared to others. I wanted to go to Israel, as that had been my father’s dream, but it wasn’t easy to get there. Then it was our turn and that was the day our misery truly began. In the end my mother filled it with food she had cooked and warm clothing and bedding. They had traveled for days in the dark, 70 women and children packed shoulder to shoulder in a cattle car, with little food and a single sanitation bucket to share. I think he picked up a potato skin or something. That’s why I’m returning to Auschwitz on Monday. After what happened, and having lost 50 members of my family, it was very important for me to have my own little family, to have again that sense of belonging. We initially had no idea what had happened to the rest of the family and had no access to a phone. At this point my family was still together. We went back to live in Trenčín, the small town in Slovakia where my mother had moved when she married my father, and where the Red Cross found us a room. She and her … Imagine it like this: three generations of your family have lived in the same house in the same town. I worked for some dignitaries, including Henry Kissinger and Nancy Reagan, and I also did a lot for the Johnsons. She was born in Hungary, and both her parents survived the Holocaust. Billy Harvey, 95, established a successful career as a celebrity cosmetologist before opening his own beauty salon, working with actresses including Judy Garland, Mary Martin and Zsa Zsa Gabor. It does sometimes feel like a strange decision to live in Germany because the Holocaust is just so omnipresent here and there is a growing antisemitism that scares me, especially when you feel it in Germany, of all places, which is why I always repeat what Primo Levi wrote: “What happened can happen again.”. Quite simply, I kept it at a distance. I just wanted to die. The oral histories project, orchestrated and funded by Vida “Sister” Goldman Prince, has compiled first-hand accounts from over 145 people with powerful stories from the Holocaust. I remember the lullaby she used to sing me, Schaefeleh, schluf mein tier kind (Sleep well, my precious little child). It was a difficult time for Jewish families, as suddenly the law no longer protected us and overnight we lost our civil rights. They’ve struggled to raise a family, put kids through school, to feed them all. I saw tears in the eyes, and M&Ms in [his] hand. I mean, we were just frightened out of our wits. The very fact that my new job meant I didn’t have to get up in the morning in the harsh winter in thin clothes standing around for hours for the headcount was a big thing. BERKELEY HEIGHTS, NJ - The Governor Livingston High School Holocaust and Genocide class were recently engrossed and fascinated by the story of Fran Malkin, Holocaust survivor. In the most notorious of all, Auschwitz-Birkeanau, … [Later, during one of several death marches] when you stopped you were shot right away, and I was about to stop. READ MORE: The Jewish Men Forced to Help Run Auschwitz. 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