Witness To Genocide : Margit Buchhalter Feldman

"Margit [Buchhalter Feldman] devoted her life to telling her inspiring story and touched the hearts of thousands of students, educators and members of the community."
"Her goal was to inspire people to stand up for one another and fight against all forms of prejudice and hate."
Obituary, Margit Buchhalter Feldman, 90, Somerset, New Jersey, COVID victim

Holocaust survivor Margit Buchhalter Feldman, 90, died the coronavirus. (Twitter)

"It is important for me to remember that 6 million of my fellow Jews were slaughtered, and a million and a half of those victims were children."
"I am here and I firmly believe it is because God wanted me to survive and be here and tell the free world what an uncaring world did to its fellow human beings."
"You were put into a barrack, where people died. The straw that you laid down [on] was full of whatever came out of their bodies -- vomit or excretions. It didn't take 24 hours for your body to get covered with lice."
"I rose from the ashes of Auschwitz, Krakow, Greentsery, Bergen-Belsen as a child of 15 years of age from the Holocaust to rebirth and a new life."
Margit Buchhalter Feldman

"Her legacy is best captured in her work to ensure that the world never forgets the horrors of the Holocaust."
"Margit gave us so much hope over her 90-plus years."
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy

"She was just an extraordinary human being, to have lived through all that, to have lived that life and to have suffered through those camps, yet to be grateful for life, to see the promise of tomorrow, she was just such an exceptional person."
"After living through that hell, she was blessed with the gift of authenticity. She lived fearlessly and she loved fearlessly."
"It's like there was nothing that the world could do that would cause Margit to live anything less than with full authenticity and the full measure of her being."
Jim McGreevey, former Democratic State Assemblyman, former New Jersey Governor 

A photo dated April 1945 of women prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp gathering dead fellow inmates before burying them. BRITISH ARMY HANDOUT

This courageous woman who defied the intention of the Third Reich to slaughter her as they had done her close and extended family, her parents and her relatives, lived to make a full life for herself, to raise a family of her own and to become a valued member of the society in which she lived. She was born in June of 1929 in Budapest as an only child. She and her family were forced to leave their home in the agricultural town of Tolcsva, all that they owned no longer theirs. Imprisoned nearby temporarily, then shipped off to Auschwitz.

There she no longer was to know herself as Margit Buchhalter, but A23029, the tattooed number burnt into her flesh as a concentration camp inmate destined for extermination. She was only fifteen, but passed herself off as 18, a life-saving decision on her part, which ensured she would be sent to slave labour camps before being sent to a death camp. She recalled "big heaps and mounds of dead bodies laying all around", as people died of hunger, exhaustion and disease, during her time as a forced labourer.

She was liberated on April 15, 1945, alone and deathly ill, suffering from pneumonia and pleurisy, seriously injured as well, when the Germans attempted to destroy the camp with the use of explosives. She was nursed back to health in Sweden, recovered, and chose to move to the United States in 1947 where she was received an education as an X-Ray technician. Her work led her to meet her future husband who was recovering from tuberculosis, at a hospital in New York.

She and Harvey Feldman married in 1953 and raised two children together, who eventually gave them three grandchildren. On Tuesday, Margit Buchhalter Feldman died of the effects of COVID-19. Her husband Harvey remains hospitalized with the novel coronavirus. Their son is now a doctor, and he works on the front lines of the New Jersey pandemic where over 75,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus have been identified, causing over 3,500 deaths.

Although this Holocaust survivor spoke nothing of her painfully wrenching experiences for many years, there was an occasion when she had agreed to speak to young students in her Bound Brook, New Jersey neighbourhood whom she introduced to the unspeakable catastrophe that had befallen  her family of 70 related Jews, and of her incarceration in a number of concentration camps as a slave labourer. The children's reaction inspired her to continue her work as a witness to genocide.

In 1991 the-then state assemblyman Jim McGreevey collaborated with this survivor to promote Holocaust Education in New Jersey through the formation of a special commission. She went on to help pass a bill mandating a Holocaust and genocide curriculum in public schools in the state, while speaking to classrooms of children for years, and finally releasing a 2003 book detailing her life as a teenage survivor: "Margit: A Teenager's Journey Through the Holocaust and Beyond".

The railway tracks leading to the main gates at Auschwitz II - Birkenau Scott Barbour/Getty