Testimonies

Testimony 1
Colonel Lewis Weinstein:
"… We had heard all kinds of rumors and stories, but they were so horrible that they were indescribable; we just couldn't believe them. I had a great guilt feeling when I actually found out about what happened in these camps. I had talked in terms of possibly a few thousand having been murdered, but thinking in terms of six million, 20 million murdered-I was obviously very much taken aback."
Source: Chamberlin, Brewster and Feldman, Marcia, The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945: Eyewitness Accounts of the Liberators. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, Washington D.C., 1987, pp. 75-76.

Testimony 2
Father Edward P. Doyle:
"I was there. I was present. I saw the sights. I will never forget. You have heard the story many times before. On the night of April 11, 1945, my division, of which I was the Catholic chaplain, took the town of Nordhausen. The following morning, with the dawn, we discovered a concentration camp. Immediately the call went out for all medical personnel that could be spared, to be present. […] On that morning in Nordhausen, I knew why I was there. I found the reason for it-man's inhumanity to man. What has happened to that beautiful commandment of the Decalogue, the commandment of God to love one another?"
Source: Chamberlin, Brewster and Feldman, Marcia, The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945: Eyewitness Accounts of the Liberators. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, Washington D.C., 1987, p. 103.

Testimony 3
Eva Goldberg:
"And what I remember most is the convoys of Americans who were standing on both sides of the road and looking at us. They did not believe what they were looking at!"
Source: Kleiman Yehudit and Springer-Aharoni Nina, The Anguish of Liberation, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1995, p. 35.

Testimony 4
Nehama Baruchson-Kaufman:
"I remember that I picked up a flower in the garden and gave it to the first Russian soldier I saw as a mark of appreciation for the liberation. We were so happy, and we thought: this is the start of a new life!…"
Source: Kleiman Yehudit and Springer-Aharoni Nina, The Anguish of Liberation, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1995, p. 18.

Testimony 5
Ephraim Poremba:
"The Americans organized a hospital, they started doing tests, they set up tents with water and showers. We washed, they gave us soap. When did I last wash? I couldn't remember…First of all hot water; whoever saw hot water? It was a dream. As much hot water as you want, to wash with soap, with soap! You could even wash your head, your body, it was heaven, it was heaven on earth!"
Source: Kleiman Yehudit and Springer-Aharoni Nina, The Anguish of Liberation, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1995, p. 53.

Testimony 6
Bela Braver:
"…The camp guard who came to open the gate said: 'You are free and you can leave.' All the guards with the dogs that used to stand in every corner had disappeared. It was all gone, as though it had never been. It was one of the miracles!
The Russians entered, and we were in such a condition that no one moved, no one went out. We did not laugh, we were not happy, we were apathetic-the Russians came. A general came in, he was Jewish. He told us that he was delighted, as this was the first camp in which he found people still alive. He started to cry; but we didn't. He wept and we didn't."
Source: Kleiman Yehudit and Springer-Aharoni Nina, The Anguish of Liberation, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1995, p. 19.

Testimony 7
Eva Braun:
"You were praying all those months to be liberated and then it hits you all of a sudden-here you are free. But after it sank in, the freedom-I am speaking for myself-I realized that I was hoping the whole time that I would see my father and maybe, hope beyond hope, my mother, although I knew that this was not a realistic hope. But my father, I was sure I would meet him. I was positive. But still there were doubts, and I realized that I had to start thinking about the fact of what would happen if I would not...
Freedom is relative. Very much so. The thought of the future weighed very heavily on me. Obviously we knew that it was no longer our problem but still we have to make a future for ourselves and how would we make that future?"
Source: Kleiman Yehudit and Springer-Aharoni Nina, The Anguish of Liberation, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1995, p. 45.

Testimony 8
Yosef Govrin:
"The devastation caused by the war and the fact that I was an orphan came to me very forcefully on Victory Day. I saw the destruction that the war had wrought much more realistically, I suppose, than I had before. The destruction had been all around me day and night, but only on Victory Day did I notice it on the street where I was walking…
It was then, as a boy, that I grasped the full scale of the destruction…and really, Victory Day is engraved in my memory to this day as a day of…not as a day of celebration!"
Source: Kleiman Yehudit and Springer-Aharoni Nina, The Anguish of Liberation, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1995, p. 40.

Testimony 9
Eliezer Adler:
"...This issue of the rehabilitation of She'arit Hapleta ("surviving remnant"), the Jews' desire to live, is unbelievable. People got married; they would take a hut and divide it into ten tiny rooms for ten couples. The desire for life overcame everything - in spite of everything I am alive, and even living with intensity.
When I look back today on those three years in Germany I am amazed. We took children and turned them into human beings, we published a newspaper; we breathed life into those bones. The great reckoning with the Holocaust? Who bothered about that... you knew the reality, you knew you had no family, that you were alone, that you had to do something. You were busy doing things. I remember that I used to tell the young people: Forgetfulness is a great thing. A person can forget, because if they couldn't forget they couldn't build a new life. After such a destruction to build a new life, to get married, to bring children into the world? In forgetfulness lay the ability to create a new life... somehow, the desire for life was so strong that it kept us alive…"
Source: Yad Vashem Archive, 03/5426, pp. 41-42 [Hebrew].

Testimony 10
Rachel Ben-Chaim:
"We crossed the borders using several strategies, at least four or five borders. Twice we were given forged papers... We crossed one border on foot. I was carrying someone's child. We crossed another border in a goods train. They put us in one or two wagons and closed us in. The empty goods train crossed the border to bring in goods, and we were in the wagons...Later we reached Villa Emma in Italy, and we were there for a long time without doing much. We left there later, and this is how it was: they loaded us onto lorries and tied down the tarpaulins over us. The Brigade soldiers, who belonged to the British Army, closed off the road, saying that only the army could go through, and we were the 'army'. They took us to the harbor... they almost threw us [onto the ship], because it was all very urgent. We had to get into the ship's hold very quickly, more than nine hundred of us. They just poured us into the ship...
...When the ship anchored off the coast of Palestine the English discovered us. Warships surrounded us and then something happened that I shall never forget, even though 47 years have gone by since then. We dropped anchor in the middle of the sea, we hoisted the national flag to the top of the mast, and we felt that the entire Jewish people was standing on the Haifa shore, because the deck was full... you don't forget something like that, it gave us the strength to endure many difficulties".
Source: Yad Vashem Archive 03/6921, pp. 40-43 [Hebrew].

Testimony 11
Shlomo Cohen:
"I was in the (DP) camp for about six months, but we were free, we could go wherever we wanted. Then they told us we could register, either to return to Greece or go to Eretz Israel, or to the United States. I registered for two places, Greece or Palestine, but what I really wanted was to go back to Greece and wait a few months to see if anyone from my family was still alive…"
Source: Kleiman Yehudit and Springer-Aharoni Nina, The Anguish of Liberation, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1995, pp. 54-55.

Testimony 12
Ken Hamer:
"We were in Paris for some months and we couldn't be taken to Israel because they weren't taking children under a certain age […] I think under twelve or whatever it was […] and hence, we had an uncle in Australia, an uncle and a cousin in Australia, and we had passports to Australia, so we went to Australia."
Source: Yad Vashem Archives, 0.3/10333.

Testimony 13
Riva Binder:
"After a stay in Rome of two-and-a-half years we found the opportunity to shake off the identity as displaced persons. We tried to leave for Israel, always my dreamland, but the British in occupation there would not allow us entry. When my husband's relatives in South Africa sent us immigration papers for entry there we applied for permission and eventually, at the end of 1948, were allowed to immigrate there. So we arrived in Johannesburg."
Source: Yad Vashem Archives, 0.69/58


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