‘Please, never forget’: Toronto Holocaust survivor recalls ‘miracles’ and twists of fate that saved her in Auschwitz
Joe O'Connor | Nov 9, 2012 9:09 PM ET | Last Updated: Nov 9, 2012 11:27 PM ET
More from Joe O'Connor | @oconnorwrites
More from Joe O'Connor | @oconnorwrites
Matthew Sherwood for National Post
Holocaust survivor Sally Rosen
speaks to students at the Aba and Esther Danilack Middle School of the
Associated Hebrew Schools in Toronto.
Joshua, a Grade 8 student at
Danilack Middle School, is dressed in baggy blue track pants and a baggy
white-t-shirt. He is fidgeting. He is not nervous, or doesn’t appear to
be. But he has a story he wants to share with Sally Rosen, after Sally
Rosen had finished sharing hers with him.
Joshua’s Zadie, or was it his Bubby, survived the Holocaust, just like Ms. Rosen did. On the way to Auschwitz they fell deathly ill and were thrown off the train so that the other unwitting concentration-camp-bound passengers wouldn’t contract whatever it was they had. They were left for dead. And yet, somehow, they lived.
“It’s a miracle,” Ms. Rosen, an 82-year-old with dyed-blond hair — which used to be red — and big, attentive eyes, tells the boy during a Holocaust Education Week visit this week. “It is very interesting to me that you are interested in hearing their stories. Never forget them. Please, never forget.”
Ms. Rosen grew tired of people forgetting about a decade ago, tired
of people telling lies. She couldn’t stand the stories she would see
bubble up in the media about an Ernst Zundel, the German-Canadian
hate-monger, or a David Irving, the so-called British historian, or a
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the erratic Iranian president, spouting off about
the Holocaust.
Telling any audience that would listen, and there always seemed to be an audience that would, that Auschwitz was all a big Jewish lie, a plot by the Jews to court sympathy from the world.
“The Holocaust deniers will say that the Jews made up the story. They will say how Auschwitz was some beautiful place,” Ms. Rosen says, her voice rising. “And I can tell you I was there. It was not a lie. It was horrible, horrible beyond imagination. And in 10 or 15 years when survivors, like me, are no longer alive to tell our stories it is going to be up to today’s children to keep telling them for us.”
Until that day Ms. Rosen will continue speaking at Toronto area
schools five or six times a year, and on back-to-back days this week.
Some students, like Joshua, sit rapt. Hanging on every word. Others look
at the clock or look down at their feet, waiting for the day to end.
Ms. Rosen was educated at a Jewish private school in Lodz, Poland. She was a tall girl, with red hair, and she was 14 in 1944 when the cattle car she was sardined into arrived at Auschwitz. She remembers the sign on the camp gates: “Work will set you free.” She remembers a terrible stench. Death. It is a smell that has followed her through the years, a sensory memory she can’t shake. She asked a camp inmate what it was.
“He laughed at me,” she says. “He gestured at the smoke stack [of the crematorium] and laughed and said: “That’s where you are going to be in two hours and if you are not then you will learn to laugh, too.’”
New arrivals were broken into four lines and inspected by Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor. They were divided into two groups. One lived. One died.
“Mengele looked at me and I looked down,” Ms. Rosen says. “You
couldn’t look him in the eye. And then God said — ‘I shall make you a
miracle’ — and Mengele, in that moment, he looked away, and so I pushed
my mother into the [group that lived].”
Other miracles, moments, twists of bittersweet fate would visit her — in a hunk of bread she was able to share — and in a transfer away from Auschwitz to a slave labour camp. Ms. Rosen and her mother survived the war. The rest of her family, some 40 relatives, did not. Mother and daughter moved to Canada. Ms. Rosen raised a family, sold real estate and lived, delighting in the birth of each of her three children and now nine grandchildren.
“There was no one left but me and my mother after the war,” she says. “There is never a minute in my life when I don’t think about it. I tell you it gives peace to my soul to tell the story. It eradicates some of the things I remember — because there was so much death — it was a horror, and I don’t know if you can ever fully understand that.
“These were things I was helpless to stop. But it is easy on my soul, talking to the kids, because somebody is listening, and maybe those that do listen will know to avoid these things, these things I couldn’t control.
“People ask me: ‘How can you talk about it?’
“I tell them, ‘I have to.’
“I have to.”
National Post
• Email: joconnor@nationalpost.com | Twitter: oconnorwrites
Joshua’s Zadie, or was it his Bubby, survived the Holocaust, just like Ms. Rosen did. On the way to Auschwitz they fell deathly ill and were thrown off the train so that the other unwitting concentration-camp-bound passengers wouldn’t contract whatever it was they had. They were left for dead. And yet, somehow, they lived.
“It’s a miracle,” Ms. Rosen, an 82-year-old with dyed-blond hair — which used to be red — and big, attentive eyes, tells the boy during a Holocaust Education Week visit this week. “It is very interesting to me that you are interested in hearing their stories. Never forget them. Please, never forget.”
Matthew Sherwood for National Post
Telling any audience that would listen, and there always seemed to be an audience that would, that Auschwitz was all a big Jewish lie, a plot by the Jews to court sympathy from the world.
“The Holocaust deniers will say that the Jews made up the story. They will say how Auschwitz was some beautiful place,” Ms. Rosen says, her voice rising. “And I can tell you I was there. It was not a lie. It was horrible, horrible beyond imagination. And in 10 or 15 years when survivors, like me, are no longer alive to tell our stories it is going to be up to today’s children to keep telling them for us.”
REUTERS/Kacper Pempel People
walk through the gate, with the words "Arbeit macht frei" (Work sets
you free), of the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in Oswiecim.
Ms. Rosen was educated at a Jewish private school in Lodz, Poland. She was a tall girl, with red hair, and she was 14 in 1944 when the cattle car she was sardined into arrived at Auschwitz. She remembers the sign on the camp gates: “Work will set you free.” She remembers a terrible stench. Death. It is a smell that has followed her through the years, a sensory memory she can’t shake. She asked a camp inmate what it was.
“He laughed at me,” she says. “He gestured at the smoke stack [of the crematorium] and laughed and said: “That’s where you are going to be in two hours and if you are not then you will learn to laugh, too.’”
New arrivals were broken into four lines and inspected by Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor. They were divided into two groups. One lived. One died.
Pawel Kopczynski / Reuters files The barbed wire fence at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp
Other miracles, moments, twists of bittersweet fate would visit her — in a hunk of bread she was able to share — and in a transfer away from Auschwitz to a slave labour camp. Ms. Rosen and her mother survived the war. The rest of her family, some 40 relatives, did not. Mother and daughter moved to Canada. Ms. Rosen raised a family, sold real estate and lived, delighting in the birth of each of her three children and now nine grandchildren.
“There was no one left but me and my mother after the war,” she says. “There is never a minute in my life when I don’t think about it. I tell you it gives peace to my soul to tell the story. It eradicates some of the things I remember — because there was so much death — it was a horror, and I don’t know if you can ever fully understand that.
“These were things I was helpless to stop. But it is easy on my soul, talking to the kids, because somebody is listening, and maybe those that do listen will know to avoid these things, these things I couldn’t control.
“People ask me: ‘How can you talk about it?’
“I tell them, ‘I have to.’
“I have to.”
National Post
• Email: joconnor@nationalpost.com | Twitter: oconnorwrites
Labels: Anti-Semitism, Heritage, Holocaust, Human Relations
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