The Rosenberg family, Moshe-Mor and Charlotte and their four children, Aliza, Martha, Jacob and Leibush, lived in Moldawa, Czechoslovakia before the war.
In 1944, after the Passover festival, they were deported from their home to the Kosice ghetto and a short time later they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Moshe-Mor and his younger son were murdered on arrival. Three months later, Charlotte and her daughters were sent to the Dachau-Mühldorf camp. Shortly before the end of the war, the prisoners, among them Charlotte, Alisa and Martha, were taken out of the camp and put on trains.
"At the end of April 1945 we were put into wagons and sent off into the unknown. American airplanes bombarded the train, somebody opened the doors of the wagons and people spilled out. Nazi soldiers shot at us, and between the shooting and the bombing, many died just days before liberation. This happened at Poing. In early May we were liberated by the American Army at Feldafing, and lived for a while in a Hitlerjugend dormitory," Alisa recalled.
The Hitlerjugend shirts that the Rosenberg girls received were their first clothes after liberation. The three women returned to Czechoslovakia where they learned that Jacob, who had been sent from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Mauthausen, succumbed to typhus shortly before liberation.
Charlotte, Aliza and Martha immigrated to Israel in 1949.
Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection
Courtesy of Aliza Rosenberg, Holon, Israel