Interview: Krystyna Chiger, holocaust survivor

[Behind the Aegis]

3. You are very welcome.

I think this paragraph stuck out the most:

“Even in the worst hours, we laughed,” she says. “We could somehow always come up with something that would make us burst out laughing. I think that this saved us too. It saved our minds.” Sometimes her voice breaks, as though she is crying, but the extremity of her childhood experience taught her not to cry. Showing fear or making a sound meant capture by the Nazis, which meant the concentration camps, and death. And so, decades on, telling her extraordinary and heartbreaking life story, one of the countless effects of the Holocaust is that Chiger finds it difficult to shed tears.