Child Holocaust Survivor Shares Harrowing Tales

Child Holocaust Survivor Shares Harrowing Tales

The most tragic chapter of the Jewish people’s – and the world’s – history, the Holocaust can never be forgotten. The Missourian brings us this piece on Sara Moses, who survived the Holocaust as a child, though her mother was one of the Nazis’ millions of victims. Ms. Moses reminds us all that “The silence speaks to the evil-doer … The silence says it’s OK. We approve of what you are doing, and to the victims, the silence says we don’t care about you” as she shares her harrowing story of loss and survival:

When Moses was just a year old, Hitler attacked her hometown of Pietrokov, Poland. It became the first Nazi-occupied Jewish ghetto in Poland.

Nazi troops seized the town’s synagogue, beat up worshippers and robbed the synagogue of its sacred artifacts.

It wasn’t long before Jewish people, called “illegals,” were not allowed to walk the streets of their town. Their homes were taken away and given to non-Jewish people.

As a little girl, Moses witnessed the brutal beatings of many fellow Jews in the streets.

“Is it any wonder that the very earliest memory I have of my childhood is one of me and my family living in fear and terror?” she asked the students.

Moses shared memories of her mother and the stories she would tell. When she was with her mother, she felt safe and secure.

She didn’t know it then, but it would be her well-developed imagination that would help her survive the horrors she had yet to face.

One day, Moses’ parents heard that Jewish women and children would be rounded up and taken from the ghetto. Not wanting to lose their only child, Moses’ parents smuggled her to a Christian friend’s home.

It was the last time she ever saw her mother. When it was safer to return to the ghetto, she was smuggled back in.

“When I got there, I couldn’t wait to be with my mother. When I ran to see her, I was told she was gone,” Moses said. “She was taken to the death camp Treblinka, where she was murdered in the gas chamber.”

Moses later learned that from the time that her mother and the other victims set foot off the train in Treblinka, to the time that their naked bodies were removed from the gas chamber, was less than three hours.

“Treblinka was one of the biggest and fastest killing machines of the Jewish people,” she said.

Not long after, Moses was separated from her father and put aboard a train with her aunt to the concentration camp in Ravensbruck. Starvation was rampant. There was an outbreak of scarlet fever.

“The youngest children, as usual, were the first to get sick and the first to die. I was one of the youngest sick children there and I was still alive,” she told students.

It was during roll call one morning, when Moses was outdoors in the cold, sick with scarlet fever and hunger pangs, when a Nazi guard took notice of her.

The guard, Moses said, couldn’t believe how much she looked like her own Aryan daughter. The guard secretly brought Moses food, giving her a chance other children weren’t afforded.

During the day, when adults were at slave labor, Moses took herself away from her surroundings to an imaginary world.

Moses spoke of singling out one of the crawling lice, imagining that she had “gone home to her mommy, where a wonderful dinner was waiting for her.”

“I didn’t have anything, but I had my hands, so I imagined that the nails of my fingers became faces. I gave each finger an individual face, name and personality,” she said. “My fingers, I imagined became my friends, my family, and in my imaginary world there were family members as I remembered them to hold me.”

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Author: Stand For Israel | December 2, 2014