Do you have a relative that is/was a Holocaust survivor?

[Hawkeye-X]

I do - it's my grandfather - his story is recorded with the Shoah:

From: Selo Slatina (Czechoslovakia)

Ghetto(s) Satu Mare (Romania : Ghetto)
Camp(s) Auschwitz I (Poland : Concentration Camp), Neudachs (Poland : Concentration Camp), Auschwitz II-Birkenau (Poland : Death Camp)

Source: tc.usc.edu

If you have a relative that has recorded his/her story (or not yet), check this website out: http://tc.usc.edu - who knows, you may find a relative or friend or two!

I knew my grandfather gave his video testimony because I was part of it, but I'm making an effort to try to get the DVD version subtitled before I even order it.

My father was born in Hamburg, Germany in a displaced person's camp in 1947.

Hawkeye-X

[liberal N proud]

1. My uncle was one of the first troops into one of the concentration camps

It screwed him up for life.

He was never mentally right, my mother said he came home from the war like that. We always had to help him run his farm so he could survive.

It had to be terrible.

[Hawkeye-X]

3. Photographic evidence is forever.

My dad couldn't even walk through the 3rd/4th floor of the U.S. Holocaust Museum - too many memories (even though he was born after the war) and couldn't even watch any Holocaust movies, or even see his own dad's video testimony.

Hawkeye-X

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. I have YET to watch Shindler's list and I have a copy

and believe it or not some of our issues with food in the family are tied to that.

EAT my KIND ESSEN... mine kinder... you never know when there will not be enough... oh wait, why have you gained weight.

I got over that one over two decades ago... at a restaurant in Acapulco. He was going over how it was not a good thing that I could not finish the food I ordered. Mine Kind Essen. so I pointed to him that I was full... we had a long talk.

I replaced my food fetish for a much healthier pen fetish.

[vadawg]

2. interesting site....

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. My dad and his story is also recorded

at the museum of Tolerance...

And being the child of a holocaust survivor has its own special gifts....

Have passport ready at all time... have money to travel (errr flee) at all times.

Never quite feel comfortable where you live.

[vadawg]

7. always have more than one passport and more than one port for the storm

always keep an eye on the horizon for the coming storm, most important thing i was ever taught was to always, always have access to weapons to defend my family with, without a weapon you are but a sheep waiting on the slaughter...

[Ozymanithrax]

5. My father in law, his brother, sister, and their father survived the Shoa.

I have come to know several of his friends that survived.

[sakabatou]

8. No. My family got out before WWII started.

[Ruby the Liberal]

9. My family lost over a dozen in Bergen Belsen and Dachau

Thanks for the link.

[Hawkeye-X]

10. I forgot to mention that I know a live person portrayed from "Defiance"

She is still very much living, and survived by being a partisan with the Bielski brothers. She tells her story all the time to everyone.

[vadawg]

11. good film and a very interesting book, i highly recommend reading it

it was very interesting how the people in the ghettos believed right up until the moments of their deaths that they would be spared, and the difficulty the bielskis had to convince people to flee. I dont even know if it came down to culture, or just fear of leaving the towns they knew.

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. GOOD FOR HER!

I know a survivor from Auschwitz who does the same.

I need to see if we can take her to lunch one of these days.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

20. Defiance is an excellent movie.

I have not read the book. Daniel Craig (James Bond) is an excellent actor. All the performances are great and the green forest is beautiful. And it has a happy ending!

In the movie they portray the wedding of two teenagers, since they have rabbis there, a chuppa, carried about on chairs, the whole bit.

[vadawg]

22. i cant remember that from the book, but then again the book and the film were pretty miles apart

but both really interesting in their own ways.... it was wierd to watch it with my wife, her family who stayed in germany and poland were all killed, the majority of my family fought and lived... made an interesting conversation..

[tavalon]

29. Is Bielski a common last name?

My boyfriend's mother married into a family that has that name.

[Speck Tater]

13. When I was a kid back in the 50's I had a neighbor...

...who used to tell us the story of how he got those numbers tattooed on his forearm.

[Behind the Aegis]

14. Don't know. We were told all the remaining relatives in Poland and Russia...

...were killed in the camps. According to some stories, the Polish branch didn't even make it to the camps.

[proteus_lives]

15. My grandfather was with a unit that liberated a camp.

Would not speak of what he saw there. Or what they did to the guards they caught.

[abq e streeter]

16. no relatives but a very close family friend when I was a kid; closer than most of our relatives...

he lost everyone ,parents siblings, cousins ,aunts and uncles... had nothing and no one, but met and married an American girl after the war and raised a beautiful family here before he died some years ago. My WW2 vet father still keeps up with his widow and daughters. Makes my relationship with America quite schizophrenic. I'm angered, disgusted and feeling more and more hopeless at the things I see it doing in all of or names, and also the more history of corporate/military exploitation etc that I learn about... yet I also see America as the place where people like this man was taken in, given a new life when everything and everyone he knew had been stolen from him in unimaginably brutal ways and thrived, and managed to have a good life after the again, unimaginable horrors he'd witnessed and been subjected to. I of course also had relatives that I'll never know, because they did not survive ( I was born in 1951)...

[mamaleah]

17. Thank you for the link. Yad Vashem also has a database.

http://www.yadvashem.org/wps/portal/IY_HON_Welcome

We have recorded all of our family members names who were murdered onto their database. I will have to add to the one you linked as well.

[Swamp Rat]

18. As far as I know, my relatives were killed in Bobruisk.

I don't know if any survived the ghetto and labor camps in the southwest side of town, but if they did, the Russians probably finished them off after the "Red Army liberation."

[Manifestor_of_Light]

19. I believe Gen. Eisenhower marched the people into the neighboring camps

and made them SEE what they had ignored...the deaths, the crematoria, the human ash everywhere.

My husband's grandpa (General Raymond S. McLain) was the commander of the 90th Division. They would have been the first troops into Berlin after the war was over, but they decided to act like the good guys and let the Russians go in first and do the looting and pillaging in revenge.

Ray (hubby) has a copy of Mein Kampf that his father (Lt. Col.) took from Berchtesgaden, some miniature brandy snifters with the swastika and eagle on them, and some red swastika armbands and little flags. Not to glorify but to remember such evil and say "Never again".


I have a black patent leather German army helmet with a ventilated metal spike on it from WW I that my grandfather brought home. It has a metal plaque on the front with the two headed eagle and a banner that said "With God for Kaiser and Country". I think it belonged to a private, it is small.

[denbot]

21. I'm desended from Chiricahua Apaches, and Tarahumara on my moms side.

Yaqui and Mescalero on my dads side. All my relations are survivors of a holocast.

[nadinbrzezinski]

23. Yes, yes you are

and some of us do recognize it.

[vadawg]

24. i guess everybody's people have been victims of a holocaust in that respect at some point in time

pretty much everyone has practised or been victims of genocide over the centuries... I think the thing that made this one unique was the numbers involved, and the compliance that the killers managed to gain from their victims. Also the fact that there are still victims alive today so it is still fresh...

[Behind the Aegis]

25. White slaves.

[tavalon]

30. Very good point and poignant reminder

[spinbaby]

26. They didn't survive n/t

[Euromutt]

27. Not Holocaust victims, per se

I'm originally from the Netherlands. My maternal grandfather was shipped off to a forced labor camp near Bremen in 1942, and he stayed there until the British 2nd Army arrived. It wasn't anywhere near as bad as a concentration/death camp in that nobody was actively trying to kill the inmates, but they were wedged in between a set of U-boat pens downriver and an industrial zone, so air raids were frequent, and given the RAF preference for high-concentration carpet bombing, it got pretty hairy pretty often. Food was always in short supply, so my grandfather took a job as a runner, to carry messages between shelters during air raids, because he got extra rations. He saw some nasty stuff, definitely had what we now call PTSD, and had violent nightmares for decades.

My paternal grandfather had been in the Dutch army during the German invasion, as an artilleryman. After the surrender, he spent a short time in captivity before being released. But in 1943, after the defeat at Stalingrad made it clear to everyone in Europe that the Germans weren't invincible, the Germans got nervous and started issuing recalls for former PoWs to return into captivity. My grandfather had no intention of going, so he went into hiding, and spent two years living in some crawlspace over a set of sliding doors, only coming out for brief periods at night.

[tavalon]

28. My boyfriend has a relative who is quite old

and she showed me her tattoo once. I remain as astounded and horrified by that time as I ever was. This family is great. Why would anyone want to exterminate them?

[unblock]

31. my mother was smuggled out of austria as an infant

she and her grandparents were evicted the day the ss came to round up the jews but through a misunderstanding, missed her apartment unit.

they had to go through the heart of germany to the belgian border. some ss soldiers on leave actually heated up her milk bottle for her, not thinking to check for papers. they then had a picnic in the woods and took a walk across the border where a car was waiting for them. they had to take nothing with them beyond what would be appropriate for a picnic.

they then stayed in belgium for a visa to england, which was finally granted during the brief interval between the time hitler invaded poland and the time he turned west through belgium.

[DailyGrind51]

32. My father's died at Auschwitz.

Every member of my father's extended family who did not immigrate to America around 1900, was murdered at Auschwitz, and they were not Jewish.

[DU GrovelBot]

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