Read reflections and testimonies written by Holocaust survivors in their own words.
It was an early autumn day—the forest was dark and I could hardly see the sun. I felt dampness all around me and I was tired, but there was nowhere to rest as this forest had sparse underbrush and it was difficult to find a hiding place.
Every time Helena, or Heleneke, as she was called by everyone in the family, wore her light blue ensemble, I was filled with envy. I loved the dress and the cape she wore over it. My favorite part of the dress was the skirt, which fluttered up and outward when Heleneke twirled round and round. When she wore the cape she looked regal, like a real princess. Heleneke had many beautiful dresses; I did not.
Berlin fall 1944, the Americans and British are approaching the Rhine, and the Russians are on German soil. Our group of Jewish husbands and sons of mixed marriages was doing its usual work, demolishing ruins and cleaning up after air raids, when suddenly we were “detached to special duty.”
I am a baby in my mother’s arms, surrounded by the sound of laughter from my older two brothers and the shining eyes of my father’s gaze upon me.
Hands cupped around a glass of tea, Jakob Herz surveyed the scene from his sixth-floor window with wry satisfaction. The few languid flakes he’d seen the first time he got up during the night had turned into a heavy snowfall—the first since the death of his wife had persuaded him to give up the house they had lived in for nearly 50 years and move to this apartment.
In the spring of 1945, the US Army was closing in on Cologne. I was an intelligence agent, a member of Interrogator Prisoner of War Team no.66, a part of an intelligence unit called T-Force, 12th Army Group, with a mission to follow the infantry into large cities as they were liberated.
As a Holocaust survivor and volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I think much of the work we do here qualifies as building a kind of monument.
It was the sixth year of the German occupation of Prague—on a Sunday afternoon in June of 1944. On most Sundays, my mother, Zdenka, and I and my mother’s sister, Olga, and her two children, Gerti, age 12, and Robert, age eight, would visit my Catholic grandparents’ apartment in downtown Prague. The two fathers were missing—both were on “business trips.”
Listen to or read Holocaust survivors’ experiences, told in their own words through oral histories, written testimony, and public programs.
