Pearl Brown speaks about her year in Auschwitz with startling frankness.
She was 20 years old when Nazi soldiers crammed her family onto a train in Czechoslovakia bound for the concentration camp in Poland.
She recalled the day soldiers corralled her and other prisoners into a line. It was a death march.
“We didn’t know where we were going,” Brown said. “My left foot was paralyzed from sickness so I couldn’t walk. They threw me out of the line. They saved my life that way.”
Brown, 89, now lives at Kittay House, the independent senior living complex run by Jewish Home Lifecare in Kingsbridge. On Monday, Holocaust Remebrance Day, Brown will share her story and take part in a special program. Several survivors live there. They will perform readings and poems, and light memorial candles.
“We put together a Yom HaShoah program to show respect to those who went through and perished during the Holocaust,” said Kittay House Rabbi Bonnie Steinberg, referring to the systematic slaughter of six million European Jews and others by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.
“It’s really important to hear the stories from the people who went through it,” Steinberg said.
Among them is Etta Riegler.
Born in Romania, she later moved to Berlin with her family. Nazi soldiers seized them and carted them off to Auschwitz. She was just 15.
“It was horrible,” Riegler grimaced. “I didn’t even know why I was there.”
Riegler, like Brown, still bears the tattooed prisoner number on her left forearm that she received in Auschwitz, before being transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. It was liberated by the British in 1945.
“One year there was like a 100 years. It was a life by itself,” she said, her voice thin and raspy. “It was a horror.”
She can still remember the terror of traveling for four days and four nights to Auschwitz.
“We were like herrings. You couldn’t even lay on the floor,” she said. “I remember my beautiful mother. She never had a gray hair. Over night, she got a stripe of gray. She knew something bad was going to happen.”
Brown was separated from her family and crammed into a barracks with 1,000 other women.
“It was inhumane,” said Brown, whose camp was liberated by the Russians. “Not even an animal I would treat this way.”
Marion Sacher, 89, considers herself one of the lucky ones.
She was 15 in 1938 when terror swept through her Berlin neighborhood. Sacher recalled Nazi soldiers marking every Jewish-owned store with a large “J.”
And then it happened: Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) - a two day attack that November during which German soldiers destroyed Jewish-owned stores.
“All the businesses were destroyed. The synagogue where my friends and I used to play, was in flames,” she said.
Sacher and her mother resolved to leave Germany. They needed just one more stamp. But that government office was off limit to Jews. They went anyway.
“The building had a large swastika. The office was on the 6th floor. We went into the elevator. I made a certain face,” she said, then demonstrated a stern look. “I didn’t want to look like a Jew who was afraid. Every Nazi who came into the elevator, you could hear them thinking ‘Are they? Or arent’t they?’”
Days later, stamps in hand, they boarded a train to Italy.
“The train was moving so slowly. But when we finally left the German border, that was the moment...” she trailed off, her face flushed with emotion, “I will never forget that moment.”
By Tanyanika Samuels / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
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