Address on Behalf of the Survivors

Sometimes, when I’m sad and especially when I yearn for my mother and father, I listen to songs in Yiddish—the language of my childhood. When doing so, I can close my eyes and recall the cantor singing the Kol Nidrei prayer at synagogue; I can recollect the aroma of the Shabbat challahs my mother used to bake, recall the flavor of the bread roll slathered with goose fat that I loved so much, and remember my friends at the heder, where we learned how to read Hebrew.

Have you ever seen an eight-year-old female commander?Not a commander of military battles.Not even a commander in the partisan forests.A commander who takes charge of her family – her sick mother and a little sister – for years.

30 kilos!I was sitting with my loved ones on Friday night, in front of a table laden with delicacies, and I was suddenly blindsided by the memory: 30 kilos.That's what the German Nazis allowed us to take with us from the home we had lived in for so many years. 

I, Roza Bloch, born in Kovno, Lithuania, stand here before you on behalf the Holocaust survivors, filled with emotion.Miraculously, I survived the horrors of the Holocaust, but fate did not spare my family, my community and my people.

I, Naomi Cassuto, born in Strasbourg, 81 years old, a Holocaust survivor, recount my memories from the time of the Holocaust.I was five years old, we lived under the Vichy regime in southern France. I remember the terror, the red faces of the farmers, I remember moments of hunger and the fear of getting caught. I also remember the greenery of nature. I was always looking for a four-leaf clover because I believed that if I found one the war would end.And I remember my father's hand reaching down to me from above. My father built me a dollhouse among the trees and taught me to play the recorder...

I, Zipora Granat née Gerschenfisch, 87 years old, stand here before you filled with longing for my parents, who were murdered in Auschwitz.  Perhaps it's strange to think that at my age I still miss my father and mother, but that is really the essence of my Holocaust story.Before the war, I was part of a happy family living in France – Mother, Father and four children; I was the eldest.  I grew up in a house filled with warmth and love.  We didn't own much, but it was a cosy, Jewish home. The memory of my father blessing me under his tallit (prayer shawl)...

My name is Zipora Nahir.
I was born in 1930, in the town of Hrubieszów, Poland.We were a small family: my parents, Mariem-Szajndl née Weinstein and Mosze-Abraham Sztecher, my sister Sarah and I, Feigale, but we were surrounded by grandparents, uncles and aunts and many cousins.The war broke out on 1 September 1939. Step by step, we experienced every phase of the occupation.

When I arrived at Lager C, Auschwitz in July 1944, there were some 30,000 Jewish women there.  By the end of October 1944, approximately 500 women remained, having survived Mengele's selections.  They were the ones considered fit to work.My cousin and I remained there in one of those Blocks.  Earlier, we were three – with my little sister Elvira.  But Dr. Mengele separated us in the big selection on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, and took her away from me, and from this world.

I, Zehava Roth née Brodman, am the sole survivor of my family.I speak to you today on behalf of tens of thousands of children like me, who were uprooted from their protective and loving family environment, thrown into a hostile world and became "nobody's children".
In 1942, we lived in the Bochnia ghetto – my parents Moshe and Chana Brodman, and my brother Ben Zion, together with uncles and aunts, cousins and grandparents.  Although I was wrenched from my family at age 7, I still have early childhood memories – from before the outbreak of the war, and certainly...

Every child knows when he was born. Who his mother and father are.  What his family name is.  This right was taken away from me.  This is a summary of my life story:  a childhood in the shadow of a lost identity.Over the years, I’ve managed to gather very little autobiographical information, so the picture of my life looks like a puzzle with only very few pieces.

70 years.April 1944, the Kovno ghetto, Lithuania.An 11-year-old boy dressed up to blend into the crowd, I joined my mother’s brigade, which crossed the river on the way to work.  Her instructions were clear:  on reaching the other side, like Lot’s wife I was not to look back. Walk straight ahead, into the hills; a woman would be waiting for me there.Like Moses in the bulrushes, I was cast by my mother, the poetess Lea Greenstein, onto the shores of life. She gave me life twice, but was unable to save her own even once.

This evening I am speaking in the name of all those who couldn't be here tonight: Those, who underwent all the suffering and whose cry was brutally cut off. Those who wrote, in the cattle cars, with their blood, "Seek revenge for our lives which have been lost." Those who were murdered in the forests of Treblinka, Ponary and Babi Yar, but the silence that enveloped them will cry out forever.

I was born in Kovno, Lithuania, where the Jews were murdered by the Nazis and the Lithuanians among whom they had lived for hundreds of years.When the Soviets occupied Lithuania, a year before the Nazi invasion, they dissolved the Jewish organizations, closed the Jewish newspapers, imprisoned most of the Zionist leadership and exiled thousands of Jews to Siberia. At the same time Lithuanian army officers fled to Berlin, and when the Nazi invasion started, they returned to Lithuania with the Germans and began murdering Jews.

Distinguished guests, fellow Holocaust survivors, ladies and gentlemen.When we gather here each year on Har Hazikaron in Jerusalem, to unite with the memory of our loved ones, victims of the Shoah, and to pay tribute to the Jewish fighters in the ghettos, forests and death camps, we should declare loudly to the whole world “Mir Zaynen Do!” – We Are Here!

65 years have passed since I was liberated from the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.The Germans entered Fiume, Italy, in September 1943. Vincenzo Tambini, Righteous Among the Nations, helped us hide. Fearing betrayal, we attempted to flee to Switzerland, and were caught. In May 1944, we were transferred to the Fossoli di Carpa camp, and from there, we were deported to Auschwitz. 80 of us were crammed inside a sealed cattle car, without air, food or water. Seven days later, we arrived, more dead than alive, at the platform of Birkenau. I was 16 years old, thirsty, starving and terrified. My family...

The first selection took place 3,400 years ago. “Let us deal shrewdly with them,” says Pharaoh, “so that they may not increase” (Exodus 1:10). The conclusion was “if it is a boy, kill him; if it is a girl, let her live.” And a baby that was just three months old, the first child of the Holocaust, Moses, (he hadn’t received the name Moses yet), is found in the wicker basket in the Nile, and the first Righteous Among the Nations, the daughter of Pharaoh, opens the basket. Pay attention to the words of the Bible: “When she opened it, she saw that it...

In the winter of 1944 we were liberated by the Red Army.  From the Polish partisan base at Panska Dolina I hurried to my hometown of Luck.   I wore myself out walking through the streets, hoping to find a Jew.  Luck had become a Jewish town devoid of Jews.

Ladies and gentlemen,
I was there, and I speak here tonight as a refugee from the Holocaust.  We are all refugees from the Holocaust. Even those of us who didn’t go through it.  Even those who had not yet been born then.  Every human being is a refugee from the Holocaust. From the beginning of time, mankind has been witness to genocide.  After the Holocaust too, we have seen genocide in Biafra, Cambodia, Rwanda, and we must now cry out against the genocide occurring at this very moment in Darfur, Sudan while the world sits with its arms folded, and sends a few sacks...

Never in the course of human history, has man been sentenced to death merely because he was born.  The Jew, who loved life, was born into a world of love. That is what Esther Srul was saying in the letter she left behind:“Dear brothers and sisters, it is so hard to bid farewell to this beautiful life.  You who remain alive, do not forget our small, guiltless Street of the Jews”.And here is what little ten-year-old Yuta writes to her father:“I want to say goodbye to you before I die.  We very much want to live, but what can we do – they don’t let us....

60 years ago, on May 4th 1945, I was a prisoner in the Mauthausen-Ebensee concentration camp. This was almost my last stop after five and a half years, during which I was in the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, Gross Rosen and the death march to Mauthausen. I weighed just 32 kilos, and was close to death, in body and in spirit. Most camp inmates were in a similar state.

I am a Holocaust survivor – I survived.  My family: my father, mother, sister, uncles and aunts did not return.I was left totally alone.Today I am a happy grandmother. My husband and I have two sons, and six grandchildren, two of whom serve in IDF combat units. This family forms the basis of the new generation that ensures the renewal and continuity of the family that was utterly annihilated in the Holocaust.Today, like many other survivors, I tell my story in schools, army bases, and anywhere else people are willing to listen.  In this way, we witnesses are partners in Yad Vashem’s...

60 years ago on 19 April, 1943 - Passover eve - members of the Jewish Fighting Organization went from house to house in the Warsaw ghetto and informed the last surviving inmates who had escaped the two previous deportations that armed policemen were surrounding the ghetto wall, and that in the morning the final deportation of the tens of thousands of remaining Jews would begin.This was probably the first time that Jews inside a ghetto had prior information regarding what was to befall them and when.  Hundreds of fighters armed with inadequate weapons took up pre-arranged battle positions,...

I would like to talk about names – not on behalf of the survivors, as they can speak for themselves – but on behalf of the dead, even though I was not authorized by them to do so. Firstly, about the name of the day on the eve of which we are gathered here: Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, a title chosen in the early years of the State of Israel. This name implies that the Holocaust of six million people, and the heroism of those who took up arms, the rebels and partisans, are two separate entities, which they are not. The heroism is at the heart of the Holocaust,...