One Woman’s Story

From a contemporary American perspective, it is nearly impossible to fathom the horrors of warfare and the potential atrocities humans can enact on each other. Living in an insular and isolated environment like a college campus, we rarely see firsthand the struggles that others have endured. Even rarer is the opportunity to interact with someone who has lived through such terrors as the holocaust committed by Nazi Germany.

On Thursday, April 29 the Jewish Student Union (JSU) hosted a presentation by Sophia, a holocaust survivor who goes by her first name only.

Sophia is part of the Speakers Bureau of the Holocaust Resource Center of Buffalo (HRCB). HRCB is a non-profit organization dedicated to holocaust education and the honoring of holocaust victims and survivors.

HRCB has recorded oral testimonies of 19 holocaust survivors who live in Western New York. The survivors often travel to the greater Buffalo area to speak about their experiences, according to Sylvia Schwartz, the executive director of the HRCB.

In a holocaust, there are three groups, according to Sophia. The victims, the perpetrators and the bystanders. For Sophia, the third group is the most dangerous.

“If you hear people targeting a group as a whole, stand up and say something, do something,” Sophia said. The power of a single voice is often enough to convince others that what is happening is wrong. It is the bystanders that allow the perpetrators to commit their deed, Sophia added.

“It is important to put the interests of others before your own,” said Brian Rashty, a freshman computer information systems major.

Those who seek to exterminate others are convinced they are right.

“They have God or whoever on their side. There is no reasoning with that mentality,” Sophia said. The only way to break down these barriers is to understand that behind every name there is a story. “A good father who loved his children. A mother who liked to sew, ordinary every-day things,” she said.

Sophia was born in Amsterdam, Holland. She was only 11 years old when the German army invaded Holland on May 10, 1940. The German persecution of Jews and other groups was gradual. According to Sophia, Jewish men aged 17-30 were the first to disappear. “No one returned after they got on the trains,” Sophia said.

In Sophia’s neighborhood, only a few miles away from the refuge of Anne Frank, entire families were rounded up in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, or Dutch Theatre, located in Amsterdam. From the theatre victims were sent to train yards where they would be dispersed to various concentration camps in Poland, Germany and elsewhere.

“If you left the train on the right side, you were to be gassed immediately,” Sophia said. “Those who went out on the left side were put to work until they dropped dead.” After hiding in 11 different host houses, Sophia was eventually found in December of 1944. She was sent to Westerbork where Jews were kept until they could be sent to concentration camps. The rail lines in Germany were in disrepair from Allied bombing, so transport was difficult.

In January 1945, Sophia and other healthy prisoners of Westerbork were taken to inland Germany to work for the war industry. Sophia spent the rest of the war in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. “Bizarre is the only word I can describe my experience there,” she said. “Really there are no words in any language to describe what I experienced.”

With no one returning from the concentration camps, there were no stories of the camps, so Sophia’s shock was tremendous. Bodies were piled on top of each other in mounds; it was Sophia’s job to cart the corpses from the barracks to the piles.

Without proper facilities on site, feces and vomit covered the floors of the barracks where she stayed. Prisoners were forced to stand at attention before the Nazis for hours, without being provided food or water, according to Sophia's oral account on http://www.holocaustcenterbuff.com.

“The holocaust was a horrible thing, I hope it never happens again,” said Sarah Shulman, a sophomore education major. “You can see it happening again in countries like Rwanda. Speak up for what you believe and we can stop it.”

Sophia does not describe herself as a deeply spiritual person, although she does take pride in her Jewish heritage. “Hitler made a Jew out of me,” she said. Sophia added that she was young and wanted only to live. “We didn’t think about the past or the future, we only thought about things one day at a time. It was mostly luck that I survived.”