Faith

Dita Kurschner

Convinced that no Jew would survive the Holocaust, Dita considered it important to record Jewish prayers. Since she did not know Hebrew, she recorded them as she heard them, in Latin characters.

Dita was born in Vienna in 1930; her family fled to Hungary in 1939. In April 1944, they were taken to a ghetto and in June 1944 were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In Auschwitz, Dita’s mother, Hedy, adopted 15-year-old Zsuzsana (Zsuzsi) Weber, whose family had been murdered. They were sent from Auschwitz to Gelsenkirchen and thence to Sommerda. It was at this camp that Dita stole the stickers from ammunition boxes on which she recorded the prayers that she heard a woman named Klari Kahna recite as she prayed. As the war wound down, they were taken on a death march. Klari Kahna was killed in a shelling on liberation day. Dita’s father, Lajos, was murdered. Dita, her mother, and Zsuzsi were liberated in Leipzig and immigrated to Israel.

There was this woman there, Klari Kahna. She prayed all day and night. I listened to her prayers and I thought I’d write them down so that if we’d die they would know that Jewish women had been there. I sat next to her all night, writing. She prayed in archaic Hebrew and I recorded the prayers in Latin characters.

From Dita (Kurschner) Segal’s testimony, 2006