Vera (Miriam) Dotan

 Vera (Miriam) Dotan was born in 1931 to a family of four in  Budapest, Hungary. When the Germans invaded in 1944, her happy and culture-rich life completely changed, and within a month all the Jews were sent to a ghetto where they lived in intolerable conditions.

In July they were taken on a three-day journey, without food or water, to Auschwitz. Upon arrival, Vera and her mother were separated from her father and brother, and Vera was sent off with the other children. Desperate to rejoin her mother, Vera seized the first opportunity to escape from the group and look for her mother, but she was caught by the warden of the women’s camp, beaten, and returned to the children’s quarters.  Later that day she fled the children’s group again. This time she found her mother, and the two managed to stay together.

After three months of selections and labor, they were sent to work at Wohldorf, an air base near Frankfurt. After Wohldorf was evacuated, they were transported to Ravensbrueck. When Vera’s mother was sent to work in the Siemens factory, Vera ran after her. Fortunately, the group was one worker short, and Vera was allowed to join.

At the end of April 1945, Ravensbrueck was evacuated and the prisoners were marched away. They walked under constant allied bombardment, and any stragglers were shot. In the confusion, eight women—including Vera and her mother—ran to hide in a nearby stable. When the stable caught fire, they escaped to a ditch, only to find three SS soldiers lying there. The soldiers tried to use them as human shields, but again they managed to flee, and Vera and her mother slowly made their way towards Berlin, from where they traveled to Prague and then back to Ujpest. When they arrived home, they were heartbroken to discover that Vera’s father had been murdered and cremated the day he arrived at Auschwitz and her brother had died just a few weeks before liberation.

After the war, Vera married a friend of her brother’s, and in 1949 they moved to Israel, followed a year later by her mother. Today they have two sons and five grandchildren. 

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Esther Eisen

Esther Eisen was born in 1929 in Lodz, Poland, to a family of four. In 1939, after the German invasion, the family was relocated to the ghetto. Crowded into one room with her aunt, cousin and another woman, and with no income, it was difficult to subsist. After her eldest brother died of starvation and her mother fell ill, Esther found a job making artificial flowers.

In September 1942 the Jews were commanded to report to the courtyards; the elderly, children and the sick—including Esther’s mother—were taken to Chelmno. Esther soon fell ill herself with typhus, but she later recovered and returned to work. In August 1944, the ghetto was liquidated and the remaining Jews—including Esther and her father—were transported to Auschwitz. The men and women were separated immediately upon arrival, and after ten days, Esther was sent to Bomlitz labor camp. A month later she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, and then to Elsnig, where she worked until April 1945.

As the allies approached, the prisoners were loaded onto trains without food or water, and taken deeper into German territory. On the way, the train was bombed and many passengers were killed, but Esther escaped with a friend into the woods. Returning to the destroyed railway the next day, they learned that the Germans had assembled 100 of the women prisoners inside a building and burned it down.

At the end of the war, Esther returned to Poland and tried, in vain, to discover the fate of her father. After the Kielce pogrom, she decided to leave Poland along with other DPs. Along the way, Esther met Ya’akov (Kobe); they fell in love, married in Bergen-Belsen, and immigrated to Israel. Kobe fought and was killed during the War of Independence. Esther later married Romek, a childhood friend from Lodz, and the couple had three children and two grandchildren. Today Esther is an sculptor, a poet and a writer.

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Yehuda Feigin

 

 Yehuda Feigin was born in 1931 in Kovno, Lithuania, the youngest child to a Zionist family of four. In 1941 the Germans entered the city, and many Lithuanians joined in the rioting against the Jews. Within a few months, all the Jews were concentrated in the ghetto in Slobodka; the Feigins shared a four-roomed house with three other families. Yehuda helped support his family by cultivating a small vegetable garden in the courtyard, gathering wood and selling candies.

The many aktions in the ghetto diminished the number of its residents, including much of Yehuda’s extended family. During the children’s aktion, Yehuda and his mother hid in the basement. The following day, still fearing for his son’s life, Yehuda’s father asked the food distributor to hide Yehuda underneath the canvas in his truck. Yehuda returned to the ghetto the next day.

In July 1944 the ghetto was liquidated and the remaining residents were loaded onto trains.  The women and children disembarked at Stutthof, but Yehuda chose to stay with his father and the train continued to Landsberg. After a week, the 131 children of Kovno were separated from their families and sent to Auschwitz, where they were used as “human horses” hitched to wagons carrying items from place to place. The children formed a cohesive group and gave each other vital support.

During the selektions on the eve of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur in September 1944, some 90 children were sent for extermination, including the youngest—an eight-year-old boy—who tried in vain to exchange his portion of bread for his life. After Auschwitz was destroyed the remaining children were marched 50 kilometers to the train station, and sent to Mauthausen. During the journey the train was bombed, killing a number of passengers. After two months, they were transferred to a tent encampment and then on to Gunskirchen, where they lay in the mud under pouring rain, without shelter or food. Many people died, but the children of Kovno managed to survive until their liberation in May 1945.

After the war the Feigin family reunited, and in 1948 made aliyah. Yehuda married an Israeli-born woman, Aviva, in 1955, and today the couple has three sons and three grandchildren.

 

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Stella Franco Israel

 

 Stella Franco was born in Rhodes in 1926, the eldest of seven children. Until 1943, the country was far removed from the war, but in 1944 Rhodes began being bombed heavily. During Passover a bomb struck the family’s home, killing Stella’s mother and five siblings. Overcome by grief, Stella’s father moved the remnants of his family to a nearby Greek village, where they stayed for three months. In July the Germans entered the village and assembled the 2,000 Jews into a building. The day after Stella was incarcerated, they were loaded onto four freighters headed for Piraeus. One ship was sent to Kos, to collect the island’s 200 Jews. Another stopped in Leros and picked up Daniel Rahamim, the only Jew on the island (Daniel perished in the Holocaust, together with his family from Rhodes).

Nearly a month later, with no food and little water, they arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Those who had survived immediately underwent a selektion—Stella’s father, who was young and relatively healthy, chose to go with his elderly parents and small daughter to their deaths, leaving Stella alone. Stella and the other young women from Rhodes who were admitted into the camp refused to believe their families had been destroyed, despite the smoke spiraling out of the crematoria.

In November, Stella was transported to the Wilstedt camp in Germany. There she met 32 young women from Rhodes, including her aunt, which slightly alleviated her suffering. Following bombings of the camp, the women were transferred to Theresienstadt. On 8 May, the Russian army arrived and was greeted with great joy. Stella stayed in the camp for a few more weeks to regain their strength before journeying on to Prague, and eventually settling in Bologna, Italy. Two years later, she succeeded in contacting one of two uncles who lived abroad. He flew her to his home in the Congo and warmly welcomed her into the family. Soon after she met Salvator Israel, originally from Rhodes, who had also lost his family in the Holocaust. They married and had two children, and after many happy years, immigrated to Israel. Today, Stella has four grandchildren.

 

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Zvi Kratz

 

Zvi Kratz was born in 1924 in Chust, Czechoslovakia, into a religious family of six. Following the Nazi invasion in March 1939, all Jewish children were expelled from school, and Zvi worked to help support his family.

Zvi was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in June, with the other Jews of Chust. After a three-hour wait in the cattle cars while Jews from the previous transport were being exterminated, Zvi and his father Avraham were separated from his mother and three brothers, who were sent straight to the gas chambers. The next day, Zvi persuaded his father to sign up for work with him. They remained in Auschwitz for a few more days where Zvi found Pnina, his sweetheart. They pledged to meet after the war.

Zvi and his father were sent to work in a labor camp inside the destroyed Warsaw ghetto, tearing down the ruins to reclaim the building materials. In the summer of 1944, after the Polish uprising, the prisoners were evacuated to Dachau—an exhausting 13-day journey in which many prisoners died. Zvi and his father were placed in Kaufering 7—a secondary camp of Dachau—where the prisoners lived in dugouts and performed hard labor. Two months later, typhus swept through the camp, killing more than half the prisoners. Zvi’s father who died in his arms in February 1945, two months before liberation. Zvi also fell ill, but a week later all the prisoners, including the sick, were forced on a three-day march to Allach.

 Lying exhausted in his cabin, Zvi soon heard cries of joy; the Americans had arrived and liberated the camp. Despite losing his will to live, Zvi was transferred to a hospital near Munich, where he spent a month recuperating. He then returned to Chust, found Pnina and married her. In 1949 they immigrated with their young son to Israel, and settled in Jerusalem, where their daughter was later born. Today Zvi has eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

 

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David Leitner

 

David Leitner was born in 1930 in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary, into a religious family of six. In 1938, his father was drafted into the Hungarian army, returning in March 1944, just before the German invasion. Within a few weeks, local gendarmes had confiscated the Jews’ valuables and herded them into a ghetto. Six weeks later they were taken to the train station, packed into cattle cars and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

At Birkenau, the men of David’s family were separated from his mother and sisters, who were murdered immediately. David’s father and brother were sent to Buchenwald and from there to Bergen-Belsen, while David remained in Birkenau with 40,000 other children. Being tall and strong, David survived further selektions, as well as a severe beating after he was caught trying to escape on one of the transports exiting the camp. On Simchat Torah, David was herded with hundreds of other children to the crematorium. Amid cries of Shema Yisrael and calls for their parents, the children were stripped naked for extermination. Suddenly the process stopped; a group of children was needed to unpack potatoes from a train of supplies that had just arrived. David was among 50 children chosen for the task: they worked amidst the whistle of bullets, as guards shot at them for amusement.

In January 1945, David was transported to Mauthausen where the prisoners were whipped by SS soldiers and left naked in the freezing cold for three days. In April, they were marched through the pouring rain to Gunskirchen, where thousands of them huddled together in a camp of roofless shacks. On 4 May, the survivors discovered that the Germans had fled the camp so David made his way to a nearby town. After six months in hospital, David was strong enough to return to his ruined home. There he found his brother, who told him that their father had died marching from Bergen-Belsen.

Three months later David traveled to Czechoslovakia with the Bricha (Escape) organization, and then to Austria and Italy. In 1949, he sailed to Israel, joining the IDF while still aboard the ship. He settled in Nir Galim, where he met his Israeli-born wife, Sarah. Today David and Sarah have two daughters, ten grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

 

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