Meet our Survivor Volunteers

Eve Kristine Vetulani

“During the war he asked my mother, ‘Can you take a Jewish woman into your house?’ and, no, he asked me, if my mother would take this Jewish woman, and I said no, never tell her that she is Jewish. This grandmother did not want to go with her Jewish children to Italy, she said I’m too old I am going to die here, I’m not going any place, I love this city, okay. And the cook was left with her, but then when she came to live with us the cook would always come to deliver food so that my mother really didn’t have to do anything except make the toilet paper. But everything else was delivered. And so he was also the one who, she stayed. And I was already in Germany and she died peacefully in our house and nobody knew. Except that I had to teach her, my uncle said, you have to teach her prayers, Catholic prayers, the first thing they do they ask you about the Christian Catholic holidays, and the years of this and that.”
(postwar testimony)

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Survivor Volunteers

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Born January 8, 1926, in Zgierz, Poland

Listen to Leon Merrick discuss being evacuated from a forced labor camp and transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp »

Listen to Leon Merrick discusses the importance and difficulties of work in the Lodz ghetto »

Leon was the oldest of two boys born to a Jewish family in Zgierz, Poland, a city well known for its textiles. In 1939, after Germany invaded Poland, Leon’s family left Zgierz for Lodz, Poland. They were forced into a ghetto in 1940. The ghetto was in the city of Lodz. Four years later the ghetto was closed and Leon was taken to a forced labor camp in Kielce, Poland. He worked in an ammunition factory for 3 months. In 1944, as Soviet forces began an offensive, Leon was taken to a forced labor camp in Czestochowa, Poland. At the end of December 1944, the Germans evacuated the camp and took its prisoners to Buchenwald, a concentration camp near the city of Weimar, Germany. Three months after entering Buchenwald, Leon was taken to Flossenburg, another concentration camp. He was there for three weeks until, as the war came to a close, the Germans herded the camp’s survivors on a death march. The death march lasted three to four days. On April 23, 1945, U.S. forces liberated the survivors near Chan, Germany. Leon immigrated to the United States in 1949 and was drafted into the American army in March 1952. He reached the rank of sergeant. Leon met his wife Nina in Washington, D.C.; she is also a Holocaust survivor.