Holocaust Survivor | Gisele Desenberg | USC Shoah Foundation

Jul 25, 2024 | With Assistance from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Supported by the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future and by the German Federal Ministry of Finance.

Holocaust Survivor | Herta Weinstein | USC Shoah Foundation

Jul 26, 2024 | With Assistance from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Supported by the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future and by the German Federal Ministry of Finance.

Éva Fahidi, Outspoken Holocaust Survivor, Dies at 97

THE NEW YORK TIMES: She saw her family members marched off to their deaths while she went to a forced-labor camp. It took her almost 60 years to begin telling her story.

Éva Fahidi at her home in Budapest in 2015. “My youth came to an abrupt end on the 1st of July, 1944, on the ramp of Birkenau,” she wrote in her memoir. | Akos Stiller for The New York Times
Éva Fahidi, a Holocaust survivor who late in life began speaking out and writing about her experiences, as well as expressing them in dance, becoming a familiar presence at memorial observances and in classrooms in Germany and other European countries, died on Monday in Budapest. She was 97.

The International Auschwitz Committee, an association of Auschwitz survivors, announced her death.

Ms. Fahidi, part of a Hungarian Jewish family that had converted to Catholicism, was rounded up in 1944 along with the rest of her family and taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination complex in occupied Poland. She was 18.

She was apparently saved from the gas chamber by being of an age and fitness level to qualify for a forced-labor camp. Her other family members were sent to their deaths. Josef Mengele, the Nazi death camp doctor, presided over the selection process.

“My youth came to an abrupt end on the 1st of July, 1944, on the ramp of Birkenau,” she wrote in “The Soul of Things: Memoir of a Youth Interrupted” (2005) after detailing a carefree youth. “The life I have described above was gone in the split second it takes to wave a hand — Mengele’s motion that ordered me into one line and the rest of my family into the other.” » | Neil Genzlinger | Thursday, September 14, 2023

The 1940 Nazi Invasion of Paris | Holocaust Survivor Paulette Shaw | USC Shoah Foundation

Jun 14, 2023 | Paulette Shaw was born in London, England in 1916. Paulette grew up in Paris, where her father worked as a tailor.

On June 14, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Paris. Jews were removed from their places of work, banned from entering many public spaces, and forced to wear yellow Star of David badges on their clothing to identify themselves. Over 13,000 Jews were later sent to concentration camps.

Paulette was imprisoned in the Besançon and Vittel internment camps in France. She was eventually released as part of a trade for the release of German citizens imprisoned abroad.

Surviving Together | Queer Holocaust Survivor Margot Heuman(n) | Pride Month | USC Shoah Foundation

Jun 1, 2023 | “You have to have it within yourself, and whatever comes from the outside is secondary. You can cope with it, if you have someone you care for, if you have certain principles you abide by, and if you do what you feel is right and not what the world tells you to do. I think that’s more important than anything else.”

In the Theresienstadt ghetto, teenage Margot Heuman(n) entered a romantic relationship with a girl named Dita. After being deported to Auschwitz, Margot and Dita continued their romance in the camp, and survived together.

When Margot Heuman(n) told us her story in 1994, she censored the nature of her and Dita’s relationship. More than two decades later, Margot was able to come out to her family. Many online resources now cite Margot as being “the first queer Jewish woman known to have survived Nazi concentration camps” (Wikipedia contributors. "Margot Heumann." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 25 Mar. 2023. Web. 31 May. 2023).

To celebrate the first day of Pride Month, we honor LGBTQ+ survivors of the Holocaust, and recall how difficult living - and speaking - candidly was until recent years. In our Visual History Archive, which contains interviews with over 55,000 interviewees, only ~10 interviewees openly identify as queer in their interviews. Margot and Dita remained close until Dita’s passing in 2011. Margot passed away in May 2022.

Saved by Schindler’s List | Celina Biniaz | Jewish-American Heritage Month | USC Shoah Foundation

May 22, 2023 | Holocaust survivor Celina Biniaz was the youngest female on Oskar Schindler’s famed list. Celina survived the Kraków Ghetto, Nazi labor camps, and Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp before being rescued by Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved more than 1,000 Jews from the Holocaust.

Celina, 91, is a longtime friend of USC Shoah Foundation. Both Celina and her mother recorded testimony for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive in 1996. For many years after the war, Celina was reluctant to share her story because she feared no one could comprehend what she had been through. That changed in 1994, when Steven Spielberg brought Oskar Schindler’s story to the screen with Schindler’s List and established Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which later became USC Shoah Foundation.

Celina often says that “Oskar Schindler gave me life, but Steven Spielberg gave me a voice.” Some of Celina’s testimony was included as an extra feature on a DVD release of Schindler’s List, to help fight Holocaust denial. …

'I Survived Hitler and Stalin…I Will Survive This Ar**hole Putin Too!': Holocaust Survivor, 96, Who Was at Auschwitz Condemns Russian Leader after She Is Forced to Flee Ukraine

MAIL ONLINE: Anastasia Gulej, 96, condemned Vladimir Putin's 'genocide' against Ukrainians / Holocaust survivor was forced to flee to Germany after Russian troops invaded / Gulej compared the Russian soldiers to the Nazis over atrocities in Bucha

A 96-year-old Holocaust survivor who was at Auschwitz with Anne Frank has condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin's 'genocide' after she was forced to flee her home in Ukraine.

Anastasia Gulej, who fled to Germany after Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February, said after surviving dictators Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin she would survive 'this ar**hole Putin too'.

Gulej, who was speaking at a memorial service for Holocaust survivors, compared the Russians to the Nazis and said: 'I have no words for what the Hitler admirers from the Kremlin did in Bucha and Mariupol.' » | Rachael Bunyan for MailOnline | Tuesday, April 19, 2022

Jewish Survivor Lilian Saunders’ Testimony

May 1, 2012 • You are watching Lilian Saunders, a Jewish survivor from the Holocaust.

These videos are brought to us by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, which was founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994. The Institute has video testimonies of 52,000 Holocaust survivors, witnesses, liberators, and others.

Meet the Holocaust Survivors That Came to London - BBC London

Jan 27, 2020 • Holocaust Memorial Day is an international date that remembers the millions of people murdered under the Nazi persecution. After the Second World War, thousands of survivors came to London, searching for a new life. As most of them enter their 90s, we find out what life is like now.

Jewish Survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch Testimony

Holocaust Survivor Dita Kraus: 'For Children, Auschwitz Was Less Horrible Than for Adults'

As the world marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, FRANCE 24's Jerusalem correspondent sat down with Dita Kraus, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. Detained with her parents from December 1943, the young teenager was in charge of the few books smuggled out of the belongings of other deportees and kept in the "children's block". With these books, Kraus, nicknamed the "Librarian of Auschwitz", sought to provide a semblance of humanity in the midst of unspeakable horror.

Jewish Holocaust Survivor– Henryka Shaw: Testimony

Holocaust Survivor Anton Mason Testimony

Holocaust Survivor Frank Shurman Testimony

This testimony from Jewish Survivor Frank Shurman is from the archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and is also featured in Echoes & Reflections: A Multimedia Curriculum on the Holocaust.

Holocaust Survivor Ernest Lobet Testimony

This testimony from Jewish Holocaust Survivor Ernest Lobet is from the archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

Holocaust Survivor Brian "Baruch" Bergman

This testimony from Jewish Holocaust Survivor Brian Bergman i is from USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive®, an online portal that allows users to search through and view more than 55,000 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide.

A Conversation with Tova Friedman – Holocaust Survivor

Tova Friedman gives a detailed account of her experience during WWII. Including her time in Poland and the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

A Holocaust Survivor Tells Her Story | DW Documentary

Margit Meissner tells young people about the Holocaust and her own narrow escape from the Nazis. 96-year-old Margit Meissner survived the Holocaust, and now she’s doing all she can to make sure it’s never forgotten. She’s a very active volunteer at Washington D.C.’s Holocaust Memorial Museum. She regularly meets young people to tell them about the genocide of the Jews and how she herself narrowly escaped the Nazis over 75 years ago. She’s also taking part in a project by German photographer Luigi Toscano. He’s been travelling around the world, trying to document as many Holocaust survivors as possible. It wasn’t easy for Margit Meissner to agree to his request – just hearing the German language still invokes traumatic memories for her.

Sole Survivor Of Holocaust Finds More Than Uncanny Parallels to his Past in Trump

Are the comparisons being made between the Trump administration and Nazi Germany hyperbolic, Dr. Henry Oster, Sole Survivor of the Holocaust from Cologne Germany, doesn't think so.

The Kindness of the Hangman »

German Holocaust Survivor Gives View on the Rise of AfD | DW English

Nonagenarian holocaust survivor Horst Selbiger recalls his childhood in Nazi Germany. He sees the rise of the AfD as a continuation of the Nazi tradition.