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"There I was, an orphan, a survivor of unspeakable pain and atrocities of the war." | |||
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Ruth Webber Born 1935 Ostrowiec, Poland 
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I was very bitter after the war, towards everybody. How they allowed me to, to be, to go through such misery for so long. And then on top of it I didn't even know for a few months that my mother survived, or my father, which he didn't. And I was terribly angry at everything and everybody. Because nobody even cared after I survived, that I survived. I had to be protected even after that. When we were in the orphanage in Krakow we were not allowed to go out because some people felt that we should not have survived. And it was not safe to go out from our house, from the house we were kept in, and the garden. That was the only place that we were allowed to go. And the war wasn't even over then. It was the spring of '45. So after surviving all this--and my God, the thoughts, the hate that I had, the things that I was going to do to the Germans for doing these things to us. It's awesome for a child to even think about these--you know, I, I'm even afraid to think about them now myself. I was going to be a butcher. The things that I was going to do to revenge. And then, actually, with the help of mother, to try to forget the past, I realized that living a normal life and continue being to be able to, to feel and enjoy, that I was not destroyed. | ||
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Thomas Buergenthal Born 1934 Lubochna, Czechoslovakia 
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A Zionist group, the Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir, had, uh, more or less infiltrated the orphanage. And, uh, there was one counselor who got all of us who want, those who wanted to go to, to Israel--it was then Palestine--put the names on a list, and we would then run away, one by one, to the Zionist kibbutz in Poland, or camp. And from, and would be shipped from there to Palestine. And I signed up, uh, for this group. Problem was that, that I was the only one who had been in Auschwitz and in other camps. And so the decision was made that I should run away last, because I would be interviewed on newsreel and on radio about my camp, and they thought that if I ran away it would blow the whole operation. So I was put onto, on the list. The list was sent to the Jewish Agency for Palestine, to Jerusalem. Um, but I was told that I would be told when to run away, but I would be the last person. In the meantime, something unbelievable happened. My mother had survived the camp, and my brother, my mother's brother, was here in the United States, and they began looking for me all over, of course, after the war. And they couldn't find me. My mother never gave up hope that I was alive. Everybody told her it's impossible that he survived. But she believed that I survived. And among other places where they looked, of course, was the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Somebody in the search bureau of the Jewish Agency for Palestine noticed that there was a child in the orphanage in Poland who was going to be coming to Palestine, who met the description of the child that the woman was looking for in Germany, and notified my uncle in the United States. And that's how they, how I was eventually reunited with my mother. | ||
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Irene Hizme Born 1937 Teplice Sanov, Czechoslovakia 
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I got shipped, um, got shipped to France and finally wound up in a, in an orphanage in Fublaines. It, which is just on the outskirts of Paris. And I was one of the youngest children there, and I didn't speak to anybody except Miriam [a friend of Irene's], who was about, I guess about seven years older. She seemed like almost a mother figure in a sense to me, because she would, I had these long curls and she would fuss with them and she just was very compassionate, and I, um, the other children--I was the only child there with a number, so I also felt that there was something wrong with me. I felt that I had done something horrible, that I had gotten the number and nobody else did. Most of these children had escaped somehow by hiding, or their parents had temporarily given them over and some were subsequently reunited with parents, and some just had family members and they were just waiting to be shipped to, and you know, things like that. | ||
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Charlene Schiff Born 1929 Horochow, Poland 
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I was, and I'm speaking from a personal point of view, and I know I'm not the only one, there I was, an orphan, a survivor of unspeakable pain and atrocities of the war, and nobody extended a helping hand during the war. Now, after the war, wouldn't you think we would have priority to go out or to get out of Germany? But no, I had to wait three long years. There were quotas. There were always quotas. There were quotas to get into the United States. My...when I finally did get a hold of my family in the United States--because I remembered my grandmother's address--I still, I mean, they guaranteed that I would not be a burden to the government, and yet I had to wait three long years before I was allowed to come to the United States. Meanwhile, I, I tried on my own to get a student's visa, and I attended the University of Heidelberg for almost--well, over a year, but, uh, that would have given me a student visa. I must say that the people at the University of Heidelberg bent backwards to accommodate me. There were such a gaps in my education, formal education. It was nonexistent, and yet I took some tests and they helped me and I was accepted as a full-time student. And, uh, I will never forget that. I'm grateful for that. But I still had to wait three years to come to the United States, and I don't think that was right, to treat us in such a way. | ||
| Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. | ||||
