Claims Conference Publishes 100 Words From 100 Holocaust Survivors Globally Asking the World to Remember

Abe Foxman

Abe survived the Holocaust by the actions his parents took to hide him under false identity. Foxman’s parents left him with his Polish Catholic nanny Bronislawa Kurpi in 1941 when they were ordered by Germans to enter a ghetto. Foxman was baptized into Christianity by the Catholic Church, given the Christian name of Henryk Stanislaw Kurpi, and raised as a Catholic in Vilnius between 1941 and 1944 when he was returned to his parents. He later became the head of the ADL – a position he held for nearly 50 years. Abe is currently a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. (U.S.)

Charlotte Knobloch

Charlotte is a Kristallnacht survivor and is the former President of Central Council of Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland) from 2006 to 2010. She is also Vice President of the European Jewish Congress serves as Commissioner for Holocaust Memory of the World Jewish Congress. She is a Kristallnacht survivor who later upon the arrest of her father, was saved by the former housekeeper, who took her and brought her to her Christian family in Franconia. From 1942 onward, she lived with Catholic farmers who pretended she was their own illegitimate daughter. (Germany)

Eva Szepesi

Eva grew up in Budapest. At the age of eleven, fled with her aunt through a forest to Slovakia; they walked eleven hours. Her mother, Valery Diamant, and her younger brother, Tamás, were to follow later. Eva Szepesi pretended to be deaf and mute so as not to attract attention. However, the Nazis discovered the hiding place and initially took her to a transit camp in Sered and was taken from there to Auschwitz. At the end of January 1945 she was not on a death march as she was already presumed dead after staying in the cold among corpses without eating or drinking for more than a week. When the camp was liberated on January 27, 1945, she was rescued by a Russian soldier. She is one of only around 400 people who survived imprisonment in concentration camps as children – known as “child survivors.” (Germany)

Photo: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation (ABMF)

Gabriella Major

Gabriella is a child survivor from Hungary. In 1944, she was 2 at the time, when the Nazis invaded Hungary. Gabriella, her mother and her grandmother were herded into a newly established ghetto for several months where we had no space, hardly any food, disease, etc. Gabriella describes, “We then were squeezed into cattle cars in July when it was stiflingly hot, no toilets, no water, and no food for 3 days with the final destination of Auschwitz.” In what Gabriella considers “an incredible stroke of luck,” their transport was diverted and wound up instead in a concentration camp (forced labor camp, not a gas camp) near Vienna, called Strasshof. They miraculously survived “months of hunger, filth, diseases, often vicious treatment, her mother working in construction in the dead of winter.” Gabriella’s grandmother died in the camp. After liberation they were reunited with her father, who was performing forced labor and survived. They returned to their home in Hungary and built from the ashes. 28 people were killed from her immediate and extended families. They escaped from Communist persecution in 1956 and came to America in 1957. (U.S.)

Ginger Lane

Ginger Lane, born Bela Weber on Nov. 27, 1939, is the youngest of seven children. Her Jewish mother, Lina, is from Hungary. Her father, Alexander Weber, raised Catholic, converted to Judaism to marry her mother. Her mother, who worked for the underground, disappeared. She was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz in March. After that, her father was jailed for a month. The children were arrested and released. Out of necessity, they were baptized Catholic. With forced transport to Auschwitz looming, they needed a safe haven. A friend of Lane’s father, Arthur Schmidt, and his wife, Paula, hid the Jewish children, risking their lives if the Nazis caught them. The children stayed at the orchard, in the town of Worin, some 40 miles east of Berlin for about two years. They lived in a laundry shed. (U.S.)

Serge Klarsfeld

Serge Klarsfeld, a renowned French activist, was born in Bucharest in 1935 into a family of Romanian Jews. They migrated to France before the Second World War began. In 1943, his father was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he died. Young Serge was cared for in a home for Jewish children operated by the OSE.

Pinchas Gutter

Pinchas is a survivor of six German Nazi concentration camps. He was born in Łódź and was eight years old when the war started. Pinchas, along with his parents and twin sister, fled to Warsaw, where they were confined in the Warsaw ghetto for two and a half years. They were captured in April 1943 and deported to Majdanek death camp in occupied Poland. The Nazis murdered Pinchas’s father, mother, and sister upon arrival. Pinchas was later sent to a succession of camps; he was liberated by the Soviet Army from the camp and ghetto in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia known as Theresienstadt on May 8, 1945. After the war, the 13-year-old Pinchas was taken to an orphanage in England. He later moved to Paris to live with a cousin, and left for Israel in 1950, where he volunteered for the army. He met his wife and they married in England. He moved to Sao Paolo and then to South Africa, and now he lives in Toronto. (Canada) Photo: Nigel Hunt/CBC

Roman Haller

Roman Haller does not know exactly when or where he was born; it was sometime between May 7 and May 9, 1944, in the woods near Ternapol, in what is Ukraine today, but was Poland then. Twelve Jews were in hiding there for months. They were cared for by a young Polish woman named Irena Gut, who had previously housed the group in the villa of the a Nazi functionary. After liberation by the Red Army, Haller’s parents wanted to immigrate to the United States. They went to the American zone in Germany and were sent to a displaced persons camp in Freimann. Approval for their U.S. visa dragged on and the family eventually settled in Munich. 

After the war, Irene Gut married and immigrated to the United States, changing her surname to Gut-Opdyke. She told her family in California about the rescue only after she was asked in a 1972 survey whether the Holocaust had really taken place. This outraged her, and she asked a local rabbi to help her search for the Haller family. Irene reunited with the Hallers in Munich. Her heroic story became the basis for a Broadway play entitled “Irena’s Vow.” (Germany)

Sidney Zoltak

Sidney was only 10 years old when the Nazis invaded his Polish hometown of Siemiatycze. The Jews were rounded up, segregated in a ghetto, and eventually sent to Treblinka (an extermination camp responsible for the deaths of 900,000 Jews – his family would eventually be the only survivors among his friends). Zoltak’s family avoided that fate by escaping the ghetto through barbed wire and going on the run, hiding wherever they could. One day, their family came across a barn belonging to a poor Polish Catholic family, where a young shepherd boy recognized Sidney’s mother, Henia. “The shepherd boy’s sister had bought a coat at my parents’ shop. My mother was kind to her, she thought, because she gave her a coat to take home that wasn’t fully paid for,” he explains. “She did a kind gesture as a human being and the daughter did not forget the kindness of my mother, and reciprocated, taking us in and hiding us for 14 months. That was no small thing to do—to risk your lives in order to hide people that you didn’t even know just because you bought a coat from them. But for them, it was enough.” The Zoltaks spent the final seven months in an underground bunker attached to the barn, without seeing daylight. (Canada)
Photo: Montreal Holocaust Museum

Stefanie Seltzer

Stefanie Seltzer was born in Lodz, Poland where her father’s family, the Fiszman family, owned a large glass factory and store. She and her family lived in Radomsko, where in 1942, ten thousand Jews were deported to Treblinka, including most of the Fiszman family after her father was killed. Stefanie was smuggled out of the Radomsko ghetto as a very young child and hidden in several places. She was reunited with her mother during the Warsaw uprising. The two hid together in several spots after being liberated by the Russians. They made their way back to their hometown of Lodz where they remained until 1946. At that point they took a train to Vienna, to a Displaced Persons Camp and immigrated to the United States in 1952. She is the Founder and President of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants. The organization has hosted 32 annual conferences. (U.S.)
Photo: The World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants

Sonia Klein

Sonia Klein (née Joskowicz) was born on June 16, 1925 in Warsaw, Poland. After spending time in the Warsaw ghetto, she was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp. Sonia’s mother and 10-year old brother were separated from the rest of the family upon arrival, never to be seen again. Sonia and her sister soon parted with their father, transferred to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Itzack remained in Majdanek and was murdered the next day. From Birkenau,  Sonia and her sister were transferred to Auschwitz I, in October 1944, and in January 1945 they were taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. As the Allied armed forces drew near, they were transferred again, to the Taucha concentration camp and eventually taken out of the camp on a forced march. The prisoners were set free when the territory was liberated by the American army in April 1945. (U.S.)

Yehuda Evron

Jehuda Evron was born in Romania in 1931. As a child, he was forbidden to attend school and had to study in improvised synagogues. He was forced to wear a yellow Star of David, and was attacked by anti-Semitic Romanian youth. His family’s assets were confiscated as well. Mr. Evron endured the hardships through praying for his family’s safety every day. Mr. Evron would like future generations to remember the Holocaust and never let it happen again. Mr. Evron is involved in many Survivor organizations such as the Queens Chapter of Holocaust Survivors, Holocaust Restitution Committee, and Self Help. Mr. Evron is also a Board Member of the Claims Conference and WJRO. 

Aviva Blumberg

Aviva Blumberg was born in Warsaw in 1931. Ms. Blumberg lived with her mother and sisters. Her father was a journalist who left to work in the United States in 1940. Just before the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Ms. Blumberg was given to a stranger whom her mother had met casually. The family took the child as an act of defiance against the Nazis and also because they needed the money provided by the Jewish underground to care for the child. After the Polish uprising in Warsaw, Ms. Blumberg was deported with the family who was hiding her. After they were liberated, Ms. Blumberg managed to get in touch with a family friend who immediately contacted her father, who had been searching for his family. She came to the United States in 1945.

Toby Levy

Toby Levy, born in 1933, was rescued as a hidden child in Chodorow, now Khodoriv (Lviv district, then Poland now in Western Ukraine) along with eight members of her family. She is a retired accountant and a volunteer docent at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, living in New York.

Photo: Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust

Manfred Goldberg

Toby Levy, born in 1933, was rescued as a hidden child in Chodorow, now Khodoriv (Lviv district, then Poland now in Western Ukraine) along with eight members of her family. She is a retired accountant and a volunteer docent at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, living in New York.

Photo: Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust