Surviving the Holocaust: Full Show

Irene Vogel Weiss: You never expect to be taken from your home, put on a train, put in a gas chamber and suffocated to death. There is something in all of us that, no matter how terrible it is, you want to live another day. Irene Fogle Weiss is about to speak to an auditorium

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of Woodson High School students. It's not the first time she's done this. As a former teacher, she has spent a lot of time talking to students. But today her lessons for her students are quite personal. She shares her own story, the story of how she survived the Holocaust.

Student: What made you decide to talk about it and make presentations about it? Ms. Weiss: Mm-hmm well, I couldn't talk about it for at least 25 years. Uh, I really was, sweaty palms and pounding heart. There was no way. You know, you can say your parents were murdered. You can say your parents died. But you can't say that you came to a place where the reason for being there was to get killed, and everything else that entailed. So I didn't talk about it for a long time. But that horrible moment in history should be passed on to the next generation.

That's why I speak to make sure people know it, think about it, analyze it and learn from it. Narrator: Irene's story begins in a small town in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. She lived there with her father, who ran a lumber yard, her mother, who stayed at home with the children, an older brother, a older sister and three younger brothers. During her childhood, Irene and her family lived a very normal life in a small town until the Nazi Party began to gain a foothold throughout Eastern Europe. In 1939, the Germans annexed part of Czechoslovakia. The Hungarian government followed suit and annexed the area where Irene lived.

Hungary had already adopted many of the Nazi beliefs. Suddenly, Irene's Jewish family had become subjects of a very anti-Jewish government: they were Hungarian Jews. Almost immediately things in Irene's town began to change. Ms. Weiss: Hungary allied itself with Germany. And so everything became Nazi, Nazifide. But at that time she was already going to Hungarian secondary school. And that's when, 12, 13, we had to wear a yellow star on our clothes. So you know it was like a target and it certainly wasn't safe. It was a small farming town and that's how it was, sixth grade was the end of education.

So our parents were very interested in sending us for more education, so when we passed the sixth grade... at that time I was the third one who was sent to the big city to travel. And I actually went on the train, which was most unusual. It was a one-track railroad town, and sometimes I was the only one getting on and off. And it was the farmers who went by horse and buggy, you know, when they needed to go. And so I was traveling for a while where the train was

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of soldiers and crowded and all that.

But with the yellow star, I remember for a while I would pin the star instead of just sewing it on permanently. I put it on and walk to the train because in my city I wasn't afraid with it. When the train arrived I took it off and put it in my pocket. And then I was still in the big city where I had to walk from the train to school. I didn't wear it because I didn't have any protection there, you know? But this only lasted a few trips because once they stopped, they kicked us out of school there was no reason to go anymore.

But it was a terrible thing because you were marked, where you were a target. Narrator: The Nazis were slowly separating Jews from society, forcing them to wear a yellow star that banned them from schools, and using propaganda to portray them as the source of society's problems. Unfortunately, too many people were falling into the trap. Ms. Weiss: The little sons of farmers who suddenly had power. All they had to do was put a swastika sash around their arm and they looked like delegates who were the law. And so, and from other cities, these young men were wandering around and going to harm the Jews, you know?

They would take an older man out of the family, it seems like good sport to them. They cut his beard and... anything like that was allowed and the police stayed quiet, you know. And no one felt safe anymore. One day I was returning home after visiting my grandparents with my father. He was on the train and the train is a five minute ride, you know? And these young thugs... see, my father had a beard, a little trimmed beard. But beards weren't popular, I mean, only Jewish men had beards. Today that is different. And then on the train, they came up to him, a couple of them, and started talking to each other like, "Well, what are we going to do?

Wouldn't it be fun to throw him off the train?" And laugh and move on, start poking it and stuff like that. Nobody on the train said anything. Nobody moved a finger or a voice, you know? I mean he was like twelve and a half or something and he was terrified. But looking out the window, I realized we were getting closer to home and that's exactly what saved my father. They were ready to get rid of him. Narrator: Nazi practices included a systematic elimination of all Jewish influences. Jewish businesses were marked and customers were discouraged from entering.

Irene's father lost his logging business because the Nazis seized it without compensation. Suddenly, Jewish citizens were forced to prove their citizenship in Hungary. To prove it they had to have documents approved by the Nazis and the Nazis made it difficult to obtain those documents. Jews who could not prove Hungarian citizenship were deported. Ms. Weiss: Although my parents and grandparents were citizens, they suffered from every possible disadvantage. In fact, my father spent a lot of time trying to get it going from office to office and paying for everything. And he finally he got the newspaper. It was, I remember, they were almost celebrating.

He came back with that "it's okay, we're safe" role. Every step of the way, from when this happened until we ended up in Auschwitz, we always rationalized for the better; Always thinking that "okay, it's getting worse but we're seeing some light," you know. People simply cannot accept the worst. And here we have this document and we are safe. Except they'll make you, don't

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yourself on the street, you know? Do not get involved with the law in any way because they will not protect you. Nobody was safe. Even kids at school, younger than in high school, say, "I have my rights," you know, you hear that in the classroom.

Well, what if you don't have any rights and the police are on the other side? They don't protect you, they stand by while people hurt you or take something from your house. It is a very difficult concept that we were guilty of something, that we were guilty of being alive. Just because you were Jewish, you were persecuted. Narrator: The German laws applied in Hungary were only the beginning of the persecution of Hungarian Jews. The Nazis had created a comprehensive plan called the "final solution of the Jewish question." It was Nazi code for the complete annihilation of the Jewish people.

By 1941, Hitler's SS and police forces had become mobile killing units that initiated the first large-scale murder of Jewish citizens, both by firing squad and mobile gas trucks. By 1942, concerned that existing killing methods were not efficient enough, the Nazis had completed three extermination camps in Poland. Ms. Weiss: In April 1944, having already exterminated millions of Jews across Europe, the Nazis turned their attention to the last remaining Jewish community, half a million Jews in Hungary. The war was almost over but the final solution was advancing quickly and efficiently. We had heard rumors of mass shootings of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine.

Then, in the spring of 1944, local officials announced that Jews in my town had 24 hours to leave their homes with one suitcase each and gather at City Hall. We had no idea what would happen to us. A delegation consisting of the mayor, the police chief, and the principal of my school arrived at our house demanding that we hand over money and valuables. People always say rationalized. Ok, so we give them some money and jewelry and, okay, leave us alone. And so I know that my father gave them some things. But at that moment he had no longer done so;

He never had much, you know, he had six kids to support and we were fine. But you know, but that was after it was announced in the city that the next day all Jewish families were to report to a meeting place in the city. So we already knew we were going although we didn't know where, no one ever said where. So you know, it was all very scary. And for parents with six children it must have been extremely scary not knowing what will happen to their children and not being able to protect them. After complying, we left the house.

My father closed the door behind us so our dog wouldn't follow us. Along with a hundred other Jews from our city, he took my family to an abandoned brick factory a few miles away. There we joined thousands of Jewish families from neighboring towns. We were there for almost a month in overcrowded conditions. Our food supply at home ran out quickly and we became dependent on the daily ration of soup. Narrator: The Nazis ordered the Jews to gather in a common area, leaving most of their possessions for confiscation. The detention zones became known as ghettos. Most people who were sent to the ghettos had no idea that it was a staging area for transport to the death camps.

Irene was held in the Hungarian ghetto of Munkacs. There she endured many hardships and humiliations. Little did she know it was the least she would experience next year. Ms. Weiss: There were thousands of people there, they called it the ghetto. And there was no sanitation and so they decided that, you know, lice and that kind of thing. They had a legitimate kind of health reason and as they put it, they made an announcement and said that all girls under the age of sixteen had to shave their heads or their parents would be punished. You know they were there.

They didn't treat us like human beings. They could have said "it's a health thing, "it's to prevent..." you know. But I was so scared that I ran to the place to cut my hair because my father would be punished. It was always like that, wasn't it? You know. Like that that just cruelty. So they shaved my head. I had long pigtails at the time and I didn't even have them then, I wasn't so terribly upset about it, because I already saw that my parents and my people were just being mistreated so badly, that's It doesn't matter.

The hair will grow back. But I actually had no idea that I would get the first cut upon passing selection when I arrived at Auschwitz. Narrator: In a strange way By chance, the humiliation of having a shaved head in the ghetto would allow thirteen-year-old Irene to undergo her first life-or-death test by the Nazis. Although they did not know it at the time, Irene and her family were about to leave for one of the places deadliest in the history of humanity, the Auschwitz-Birkenau selection platform. Mrs. Weiss: In mid-May, a freight train arrived on the tracks next to the brick factory.

My family gathered our belongings and joined the crowd heading to the boxcars. No one told us our destination, but we feared it would be Nazi-occupied Poland. My family struggled to stay together. We all managed to get into the same van. Out of modesty, the men moved to one side of the car and the women to the other. A guard slammed the door shut and bolted it from the outside. It was now dark on the train. A small slit in the top corner let in some light. Hours later the train began to move. The only source of air was that little crack in the corner.

In the center of the car was a bucket for the bathroom. Hours passed, a night and a day. The bucket was filled. Looking through the crack, my father confirmed everyone's worst fear: the train was crossing into Poland. Our knowledge of what was happening to Jews in other countries came in part from these Jewish families who were expelled, you know, deported because they weren't citizens. And then some of them here and there would escape and come back, one person, and tell stories about how in Nazi-occupied Poland there were people from every other country in Europe who were literally thrown into the forests.

Also, the Poles who were native, you know, were all getting shot down by Nazi gunfire, you know? They would just line them up and shoot people. And that's what was happening in Nazi-occupied Poland. And these people who came back and told us these stories, we didn't believe it, we didn't believe it. We thought they were exaggerating. They had some trauma. They experienced something but, you know. That was our knowledge of what was happening in the Nazi-occupied countries. No gas chambers, no crematoriums, no mass genocide. Nothing of that. Finally the train stopped. We are in some kind of camp.

My father announced that our barracks here must be a labor camp. We were overcome with relief that we were not shot in the forest in Poland. Narrator: Most of the people who were on the train with Irene were unaware of the existence of extermination camps. They had no ideawho had just arrived at the most famous of all Nazi death camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau. When Irene arrived in May 1944, the Nazis at Auschwitz were murdering an average of 6,000 Jews a day, most of them within an hour of getting off the train. Ms. Weiss: There were a lot of shouts of "leave everything behind, get out, get out quickly." My mother quickly unpacked some clothes and told us to put on more layers.

My head had already been shaved in her ghetto, so she wore a headscarf. I jumped from the car to the platform. About 2,000 other people came down to the platform. My family looked for each other, urgently trying to stay together in the midst of the swarm of people, noise and confusion. As soon as we got off the train, all our belongings were thrown onto the platform and loaded onto the train, onto trucks. A guard shouted "men on one side, women and children on the other." In an instant my father and my 16-year-old brother were lined up in a huge column of men on one side.

I would never see them again. My mother, my sisters, my younger brothers and I were in another large column of women and small children. In the distance you could see a chimney. Flames and smoke came out of there. The column advanced. When we reached the front, a dozen or more armed Nazi soldiers blocked our way. One of them was holding a small stick. The one who used a stick to move my sister Serena, who was 17 years old, to the side. The next moment, she gestured for my mother and two little brothers to come to the other side.

They disappeared from sight. Only my younger sister and I were left, I was holding her hand. The cane fell between us sending my sister towards where my mother was going. The Nazi guard looked at me and hesitated for a moment. Although I was only 13 years old and would have been selected with the boys, my headscarf and a large coat I was wearing confused him. He pointed me in the direction where my older sister was going and directed her attention to the women and children lined up behind me. I hesitated to leave to see if my younger sister had caught up with my mother.

It was not possible for me to see what happened to him in the crowd. I was devastated to think that she would be alone in this crowd, so I stayed there for a while. Narrator: This photo was taken by Nazi soldiers at the moment Irene arrived at Auschwitz. Captures the moment when Irene lingered looking for her sister. Children usually did not wear headscarves. But Irene covered her shaved head with a scarf and wore the extra layers her mother gave her. She made her look much older and she had probably just saved his life. Thirteen-year-old children like Irene were generally considered too young for childbirth and were immediately sent to the unfit line.

Men, women and children from the unfit ranks were immediately taken to the gas chambers to die. Ms. Weiss: Serena and I were taken to a bathhouse where we were shaved, disinfected, and given prison clothes. They moved us to a barracks along with 200 other women. We still didn't know where we were. We ask the other prisoners when we are going to see our families. A woman pointed to a chimney and said "do you see the smoke? There's your family." In the following days, we were sent to work in a storage and processing area near crematorium number 4, where we sorted mountains of clothing coming off trains and also from crematoriums and gas chambers.

There were mountains of glasses, toothbrushes, baby strollers, suitcases, household goods, all kinds of objects that people planned to take with them. As we worked and lived next to the crematorium and gas chamber, we soon learned firsthand what had happened to our families. Columns of women, children and the elderly passed through our barracks day and night. We saw them enter through the door that led to the gas chambers. Sometimes they asked us questions. At that moment nothing could save them. The sounds were amplified when we worked at night. First I heard the whistle of the steam engine as it reached the platform and the whistle of the train.

And in half an hour, hundreds of women, children and the elderly passed through our barracks and disappeared through the entrance to the gas chambers. Those who arrived at night saw smoke and flames coming out of chimneys and even bodies burned in open pits. It seemed to them that they were being led into the flames. They prayed, cried and screamed. And I would cover my ears with my fingers. Day and night the transports continued to arrive. The five gas chambers and crematoriums operated day and night, killing up to 10,000 people a day. Narrator: Auschitz was designed with one main purpose: genocide.

Facility plans

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ed deliberate designs implemented to conduct efficient large-scale gassing and cremation operations. The sheer number of murders that took place there in a single day was inconceivable even to someone who witnessed the horror firsthand. Ms. Weiss: She was in a window. She was looking. I saw them. They even asked us questions. I saw these women. these beautiful children. Babies sitting on the road waiting their turn. And I, you know, my eyes saw it. My brain didn't accept it and my entire system didn't accept it. That's how I think I managed it. And not just in retrospect, but I know I didn't have the capacity to absorb it.

Narrator: Although they were already losing the war, the Nazis seemed even more determined to murder as many Jews as possible. Irene and her family were among the more than four hundred and twenty-four thousand Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz in just eight weeks. The killing machine quickly reached its maximum capacity. Ms. Weiss: The murder was supported. Five crematoriums and gas chambers operated day and night. But I was still backed up. And then these people are waiting their turn there at the door. And they have no idea what they are waiting for. And that's my mother and these two little boys next to her are my two little brothers.

And they have no idea. But they are waiting their turn and looking for my sister. She is not in the photo. While I certainly understand what happened to all of them, it's still painful to think that she had to go through this terrible time alone. Selection never ended at Auschwitz. Every day there was a selection, not just on the train ramp when people arrived, which was the biggest selection, but after that they were constantly looking to see if they missed anyone, especially kids like me. And that's why every day he was in great danger. They would line us up in the morning.

The routine was that they would throw us out of the barracks at 5 in the morning to count. It was a way to really torture people. Five in the morning. They lined you up in rows of 5 and you stayed there until nine or ten in the morning, when the German delegation left, all dressed in their nice clean and warm uniforms, after having had breakfast, etc. And they would come and tell us. And after that they would fire us. And so, every time there was this line every morning, they had the opportunity to look at that line and pick out the young people they missed, the sick ones they missed, or someone they just didn't like.

They wanted to get some slave labor. But as soon as it seemed that you were not able to work, you had to be killed. When they took the people there, the first thing they did on the train platform was separate the children, babies and their mothers and kill them within half an hour to an hour after arriving. So there were no children in that place. And I, who was only 13 years old, was really considered a child and not material to work as a slave. That's why they never mentioned me as a child. The word child was not to be mentioned.

We were very aware that if they took you out, you were going to die. And suddenly that becomes your life. And then you also get distracted by all the incredible, inhuman things that are happening to you. Add to that hunger and all kinds of humiliations and suddenly you are very confused and very insecure. When I was a kid I really thought I wasn't even on this planet, I didn't believe I was on Earth. Nobody knows this is here. No one can know that when the trains arrive, 90 percent of the people die immediately. And here's a facility just for that.

This is the ideal place to kill. So it can't be on this Earth. I was terrified every moment of my stay in Auschwitz. I look back and think, oh, I was a bit brave, wasn't I? It was ok. Well, it seems it wasn't. My sister tells me I cried the whole time. I was absolutely terrified because I knew they were looking for me, so to speak. But simply everything. The hostility that was thick, you know. And we were subhuman, we were dehumanized. It is such a terrible feeling that you can't, that what you fear most is your neighbor.

You know I should have been in school and not in Auschwitz. Because I was there? Why were my father and my family, why were they there? You meet people who run their own businesses and raise families. Narrator: Irene says that the system of terror that the Nazis instituted is still difficult to understand. In a matter of months she had gone from a normal teenager to a prisoner in horrendous conditions in a place where she saw hundreds of people march to their deaths every day. She already knew that her mother and her brothers had been sent to the gas chambers.

Although her father had survived the selection platform, she learned that he had also been murdered. Her parents, her siblings, her house, her friends, everything she knew as normal had disappeared. Ms. Weis: We come from civilization. Certain things were expected. Certain things were normal. And suddenly being taken to a place where nothing was familiar and the hostility was enormous. They considered us subhuman. They were the superior Aryan race, races like the Slavic peoples, the Russians, the Poles, would be designated as slave workers to help the super race. And then there were the subhumans that needed to be eliminated.

The Nazi soldiers who guarded us considered us subhuman. You couldn't look them in the eyes. You know, when other human beings treat you like subhumans, it's the most terrifying feeling because you have no one to turn to. This is your, this is your, your support group. This is what you know and suddenly you're not one of them anymore. It's very, very difficult to regain that trust because you can see how people can turn against you in a very cruel way. Very scary. Really, really scary because you have no one to turn to. Nobody who identifies you as a human being.

It's... I find it difficult to express what it feels like to be dehumanized. But the feeling is mostly terror, real terror. These Nazi soldiers did not identify with us on a human level. So if our babies are separated from their mothers it doesn't affect them because we are not the same type of human beings. And they have the weapons and the power. So it's pure terror when another human being doesn't feel any kind of empathy for you. Narrator: Around her, Irene witnessed the humiliation and degradation of her fellow Jews. She had her sister Serena to turn to, but they were both teenagers when they were in Auschwitz and most of her family was gone.

Auschwitz was a huge complex that housed thousands of prisoners in several sub-sites. Holocaust author and survivor Elie Wiesel and Holocaust victim and author Anne Frank were in the Auschwitz complex at the time Irene was there. But most importantly, and miraculously for Irene, were two other people who had survived the selection process: her mother's sisters. Ms. Weiss: And they were extremely wonderful people, especially one of them who had a way of making you feel safe with her; to remind you that you are precious to her; May she remind you that you are her sister's daughter and not a subhuman being.

I didn't feel so alone with her around her. For me, she is one of the angels. She died not long ago. She survived the camps. But she was one of the human beings who in those circumstances maintained her humanity and helped others maintain theirs. Narrator: Irene would need every ounce of her humanity to survive what was to come. In 1945, Germany's defeat in the war was inevitable, but the Nazis were determined to torture the Jewish people to the bitter end. As the front lines approached their outlying camps, the Nazis forced prisoners to go on death marches into their borders.

Irene, Serena, and her aunts were expelled from Auschwitz on a death march to the Ravensbrück camp and ended up just west of Ravensbrück, in a camp called Neustadt-Glewe, almost 450 miles away. Ms. Weiss: This definitely turned out to be a death march. They did not feed us or take care of us in any way. Anyone who fell from exhaustion or sat down was shot. He took us on the roads. In January, the snow, the cold, terrible. The road was full of people heading deeper into Germany. Our numbers were totally decimated. Because they took us, first of all, on a trip for days and nights.

There were no facilities, no food, no water, no anything, no shelter. And then, from time to time, they stopped detaining us in another concentration camp that was already overloaded. Although our last trip was in open cattle cars in winter. We ended up near Hamburg in a field where again the system simply didn't work anymore. And there we ended up starving for five months. And my mother's two younger sistersIt won't be so cruel. It's hard to do that with kids because they want to belong, they want to be like everyone else and they will inflict pain on others, on other students, just to belong to the right group.

But in a way it starts there. This idea of ​​not being, of not accepting others. You don't have to be friends with everyone, but you can't stop humiliating and isolating them. Student: Then we will be the last generation that will have the opportunity to talk to Holocaust survivors. So when we teach our children about the Holocaust, what do you think is the most important thing we teach them? Ms. Weiss: That's an excellent question. What worries me most is the ease with which young people and adults can be convinced to follow an ideology or a charismatic leader.

How do we get young people to think and analyze what they hear? And today it is as important as ever. You, we are all bombarded by all kinds of ideologies. What is the truth? Very difficult to discover the truth. And you, young people, are in a position to try to solve it: thinking, learning, learning to analyze what you hear. These people will vote one day. And that is an even bigger job because they have to be willing to educate themselves in a big way to vote the right way. It doesn't matter if they have to vote for one party or another, they just have to be informed why they do so.

Student: We just wanted to thank you for coming here today and talking to us. It really means a lot, yes. Ms. Weiss: You're welcome and follow my advice to educate yourself. And think, think, think and analyze so as not to fall into any madness. Student: Absolutely. Ms. Weiss: Okay. Goodbye Narrator: With smiles and handshakes, Irene finished her presentation to the students of Woodson High School. It is one of many presentations she will make this year, sharing a story that is both painful and important. Ms. Weiss: All the people who have gone through this are different than they would have been, profoundly different.

And I think I'm profoundly different as a person than I would have been if I'd had a normal upbringing and a family and everything else. You are moved by something that is difficult to overcome. Like what we talked about before, like your trust in human beings. And there is a lot of disappointment in that, but also a lot of pain. The pain never goes away, the loss. Of course, I have had great joy for my family. That is the best thing one can do: have children and grandchildren. And I had a very good husband for 63 years.