Shoah: Four Sisters

Ruth Elias was seventeen when the Nazis invaded her native city of Moravska Ostrava, Czechoslovakia where her prosperous family had lived for generations. In April 1942, all were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Elias’s parents and sister were deported to Auschwitz and soon murdered, but she was able to remain behind by marrying her boyfriend. By the winter of 1943 she became pregnant, a grave danger since pregnant women were targeted for deportation and Nazi regulations made it impossible to secure an abortion. She was sent to Auschwitz in the Fall of 1943. Interned in the infamous Czech Family Camp in Section B II B at Birkenau, she lived only a few hundred meters from a gas chamber and crematorium complex. When her pregnancy was finally recognized, she was placed under the care of the infamous Josef Mengele, who subjected her to a most cruel medical ordeal, forcing Elias to make the hardest possible decision a mother could face.

On the very day Germany invaded Poland in September, 1939, all the men in Ada Lichtman’s town of Wieliczka were rounded up by the SS, taken to a forest and shot. One of them was Lichtman’s father, a cobbler. From then on, she was possessed by a single question: “how will I be killed?” Every day, the Germans selected more victims for execution; the survivors of these massacres, including Ada and her first husband, were driven from village to village to perform forced labor. Eventually those still alive were deported in cattle cars to the extermination camp at Sobibor where more than 250,000 Jews from across Europe would be gassed. Among only three women selected for work in the camp, Lichtman washed laundry and repaired dolls taken from Jewish children for export to Germany. The dolls forever evoked memories of this travesty.

In 1940, Nazis designated the district of Bałuty, in the city of Lodz, Poland, as a ghetto. Paula Biren’s account of the daily operations and moral decline of the population subjected to massive deprivation of food and freedom is unwaveringly frank.

Hanna Marton was the wife of a professor who worked with Rezsö (Rudolf) Kasztner, the head of Aid and Rescue Committee for Jewish refugees in Hungary. Once the Nazis occupied Hungary in the Spring of 1944 and began to deport thousands of Jews every day to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kasztner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann for the release of 1,684 Jews in exchange for $1,000 per person. After an odyssey by train through the collapsing Reich, most reached safety in Switzerland. Although Kasztner had saved the largest number of Jews during the Holocaust, his plan scandalized many, because Kasztner had selected many of his family and friends, including Hanna and her husband, as well as those he deemed essential for the future of Zionism, to board the rescue train. Nearly 450,000 Hungarian Jews subsequently died in the gas chambers of Birkenau while the Martons survived. Hanna Marton remained acutely aware that her survival was purchased at the expense of countless others who died. Offered an opportunity to escape, she had taken it, though her sense of guilt about having been among the privileged in Kastner’s convoy is deeply felt during her relentlessly painful account.