We Remember

 The school that Josie and Benjamin attend, JFK, had a special speaker for International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  I left my German class an hour early and met Marty at school.  The guest speaker was an 87 year old woman named Rachel Oshitskey who survived Auschwitz.
It was powerful and moving and sincerely bone chilling to hear her stories from the late 1930's and through the war.  She and her large family were living in the former Czechoslovakia.  She remembers that one day the Nazis were testing out their transport system and decided to load up trains full of Jews from her town.  After hundreds of her friends and neighbors were loaded up they were driven into the woods, told to dig their graves, shot on sight and then dropped into the awaiting grave.  The very next day they came for her family.  Her parents along with her several siblings and herself were loaded up and driven out to a different area of woods.  Word got around to the townspeople what had happened the day before.  Her siblings and herself all whispered to one another that on the count of three they would run and try to escape.  Somehow their parents did not hear the whisper and did not run.  Rachel and her siblings escaped unharmed but sadly her parents did not.
After bravely and barely escaping, Rachel and her siblings hid out in a small nearby town.  Apparently one of her neighbors who was a part of the same grave digging group that she and her family were a part of had fallen into the grave on top of his son and somehow neither the neighbor nor his son had been shot.  The man waited until 4 AM to assure the Nazi soldiers had left and then looked around to find out if there had been any other survivors.  Sadly, Rachel and her siblings who ran and that man and his son were the only survivors that day.  That same neighbor found Rachel and her siblings in the nearby town and was the one to tell them that their parents did survive. 

Rachel and her siblings then fled to try to find her brother who was living in the Ukraine.  Her brother's wife was extremely worried about housing Rachel and the rest of her husband's siblings because at the time the Nazis were searching home to home to try to find any and all Jews.  They came to the house and Rachel fled to a barn.  Even though the Nazi soldiers searched the barn - hefting a pitchfork into the hay to make sure no one was hiding there, she somehow escaped harm again.
Things then were "relatively calm" for a few years.  Later, Rachel and her remaining family were gathered and sent to live in a ghetto  area with deplorable conditions.  Several family members died during this time.
In 1944 near the end of the war Rachel along with the remaining family were collected from the ghetto and brought to live (or die) at Auschwitz.  She was carrying one of her nieces as she exited the train.  They were separating people into groups, old, young, healthy, unhealthy, men, women.  Anyone who the Nazis saw fit to work went into one group.  Anyone that was too young or too old or too frail were sent into another group. The latter group, the one with the old, young and frail were all killed within days of arriving.  The "healthy" ones were put to work. 
Rachel was carrying her niece off the train and when being separated they asked her if this child was hers.  She said no but she would very much like to stay with her niece.  The Dr who was assigning her to a group said "Why don't you put that child down over there and you get into that group over there"  Rachel believes that Dr. was the infamous Dr Mengele. And as evil as he was probably saved her life that day.

After a year or so of what I can only assume were indescribable conditions the Russians came and saved those living in Auschwitz.  She says as all the Jews were walking from the concentration camp to some kind of refugee center they were staggering from hunger and completely disheveled, some of the SS (Nazi party) wives were walking down the street with perfect hair and perfect clothes and all they said to the Auschwitz victims was "We didn't do it.  We were just following orders"  Not an "I'm sorry" or "How can we help"
Rachel said that not much help came in the years after the war and in fact the help that came dwindled over the years. She also near the end said "all of my 7 siblings died while all of the German child of the same age continued to go to school, were clothed and fed and lived" 
What I was left with is this was ONE of MILLIONS of similar stories.  Millions of heartbreaking stories.  #WEREMEMBER