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Holocaust survivor Barbara Fischman Traub describes the reactions of her neighbors as she and her family were marched to the Sighet ghetto during the Holocaust.

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Early in the morning, it was the week after Passover, so it must have been end of April, early May-end of April, I believe. I think it is a very beautiful town. And it was the time when the lilacs began to bloom.

The lilac in my mother's garden was very special because it was double-petaled purple lilac. And you could see already the buds. And this was the morning when they rang-and again, the gendarmes-and we were packed by then, mother, and I, and the cook, and across the street, my brother's wife, Rosie-Rose-and the two little babies, my nieces.

We had our valises. And in the street where we lived, there were a few Jews. It was a mixed neighborhood. So there were about four Jewish families and they were all packed and the gendarmes came.

And they took us in towards another street where there were some more Jews. They put us in the center of the street where the cars and horses were driven, and they started to force us to march to the ghetto. The ghetto was in the Jewish section of the town which was on the other side of the town.

Were your neighbors aware of what was going on?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Those very neighbors in whose courtyard I played in as a child, those very neighbors who were guests at my mother's dining room table months before, peeked through their windows and turned their faces.

And as I look back know, strange that it pains me so much. That trek through the main street, in the middle of the street, driven like cattle, with the valises, with the baggages, with my little nieces, with the little infant who was five, six weeks old, being driven to that Corso where my father, had a big business where people would come to buy, would tip their hat and say, "How do you do, Mr. Fischman," and turned to my mother and say, "How are you?" [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN], which is a very respectful way to address a lady in Hungarian. "How are you, my lady?"

These very people who used to watch me bicycle through town and say, "[INAUDIBLE], you have the first girl's bicycle--" because they never saw a girl's bicycle, you know, without a handlebar-these neighbors who used to pinch my cheek when I was a little girl, they stood and watched, stony-faced, as we were driven to this town with the Hungarian gendarmes using truncheons on old people who couldn't walk fast enough. It was so shameful, so humiliating. But I know now that the shame was theirs, not ours. But I didn't know it then.

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Early in the morning, it was the week after Passover, so it must have been end of April, early May-end of April, I believe. I think it is a very beautiful town. And it was the time when the lilacs began to bloom.

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Holocaust survivor Anna Heilman recalls her part in a revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was a prisoner, and describes the aftermath of the revolt.

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I was very curious. And although we were not allowed to get up from our seat and go to the bathroom only with permission, after a while, you got accustomed to the place. And I used to go around the factory just to look around to what was going on. I used to take two little metal boxes that were used for garbage, and walk around as if I was, you know, doing something.

And eventually, I used to take these two boxes to my sister. She used to put a little bit of gunpowder wrapped up in a little rag tied with a string into a box. And they put garbage on the top box. And I was walking with these two boxes from my place to her door, and from her door back into my place, and put it under the table, and put it inside the cuff of my dress because we didn't have pockets.

From there, I used to go to the washroom, and in the washroom, share this gunpowder with another girl, with Ella. And on the way from the factory, it was about three kilometers to Birkenau, where we lived, we used to carry this on our bodies.

From time to time, there were searches. When we heard that there was a search, we used to unwrap this gunpowder, throw it on the ground, and mix it with our feet on the ground so it was not distinguishable from the dirt underfoot.

And if there was no search?

Then, we used to bring it to Birkenau. I gave it to my sister, and my sister gave it to-I don't know, either directly to Roza Robota or to somebody else. I don't know exactly who gave it to Roza Robota.

And from Roza Robota, it went-

It went to a special hiding place. Roza Robota had contact with the men from the crematorium. And they had the privileges to come into the women's camp. And in that particular spot, they used to come and pick it up, and bring it into the crematorium.

In October '44, there was a revolt in the crematorium, the Sonderkommandos, those were the people who were manning the crematorium, knew that from time to time after a certain period of where they were being murdered as not to bear witnesses. And that particular group decided that they are going to rebel.

They used this gunpowder and manufactured little hand grenades made out of metal around boxes of shoe polish with a wick and filled with gunpowder. And when you lit it, it exploded. I don't know how much damage it did or it didn't.

This revolt that took place on October 7, 1944 was aborted. Either they were betrayed, or whatever, all the Sonderkommando people were killed. But the crematorium was destroyed as well. There were four crematoriums in Birkenau, and one was destroyed by this.

After the revolt, the Germans found these little handmade grenades, and they identified the gunpowder, which, of course, we didn't know that gunpowder had some kind of special characteristic. They identified this gunpowder as coming only from the union, and only from Pulverraum where my sister worked.

They started an investigation. They imprisoned the four girls-Roza Robota, Ella Gärtner, Regina Safirsztajn, and Ester Wajcblum. They tortured them mercilessly, and eventually hanged them publicly on January 5, 1945.

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I was very curious. And although we were not allowed to get up from our seat and go to the bathroom only with permission, after a while, you got accustomed to the place. And I used to go around the factory just to look around to what was going on.

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To view the Auschwitz Album click here. The Auschwitz Album is the only surviving visual evidence of the process leading to the mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is a unique document and was donated to Yad Vashem by Lilly Jacob-Zelmanovic Meier.

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Leon Bass, an African-American soldier, describes his experiences entering the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945.

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I was sent as part of a liaison group to see if we could arrange for a camp site for our unit. And we arrived in this place called Weimar and drove out to, what I found out now, was to be a concentration camp. And I didn't know anything about concentration camps. So when the officer told us to follow him and get on the trucks, I did ask him, I said, where are we going? And he said, we're going to a concentration camp.

I really was puzzled because I didn't know a thing about that. No one had ever mentioned it in all the training I received. But on this day, in April in 1945, I was going to have the shock of my life. Because I was going to walk through the gates of a concentration camp call Buchenwald. And you got to believe me when I tell you I wasn't ready for that. I was totally unprepared for that kind of an experience.

But you see, I can never, I can never forget that day because when I walked through that gate, I saw in front of me what I call the walking dead. I saw human beings, human beings that had been beaten, had been starved, they'd been tortured. They'd been denied everything, everything that would make anyone's life livable.

They were standing in front of me and they were skin and bone. They had skeletal faces with deep-set eyes. Their heads had been clean shaved, and they were standing there, and they were holding on to one another just to keep from falling. Many of them had sores on their bodies. And I can remember this so vividly. Sores that came from the malnutrition. One man held out his hands, and his fingers had webbed together with the scabs that had come from the sores brought on by the malnutrition.

Oh, my God, I'd seen nothing like this in all my life, nothing. But when they started to move, stumbling forward toward me, I backed away. Oh, I backed up and I stopped. And I said to myself, my God, my God, what is all this insanity? Who are these people? And furthermore, what have they done that was so terrible that would cause anybody to treat them like this? And you see, I didn't know really, I didn't know.

But there was this young man who spoke English and he began to tell us about Buchenwald. And he said that these people were Jews, they were Gypsies, they were Jehovah's Witnesses, and there were some Catholics. There were trade unionists, communists, homosexuals. Oh, he went on and on. He listed so many different groups that had been placed in the camp. And I knew, that in my judgment, the Nazis had placed them there because the Nazis were saying none of them were good enough, therefore, they were not fit to live. They could be terminated, murdered. Man, I couldn't get a handle on this. This was beyond anything in my experience.

But I walked about the camp. I went to a place where the men would sleep-they called it a barrack-and I opened the door, I stepped back across the threshold, and I closed the door. But I could go no further. You see, that odor, the stench, that comes from death and human waste-well, it was overpowering. It was awesome. I stood there and I was holding my breath all the time. I was holding my breath, and I was going to leave. I knew I couldn't stay.

And so I turned, but before I could step away, I looked down. And there, on the bottom bunk near the door, was a man. Oh, he was an emaciated, that person. He was skin and bone. He was on a bed of filthy straw and rags. And he was trying so desperately to look at me with that skeletal face and those deep-set eyes, but he was so weak. You see, the man had been starved for so long and it was a struggle for him just to look at me. But finally he did. He looked up at me and he said nothing. Nor did I. So now, I opened the door, stepped across the threshold, and closed the door.

I was going to walk away from that place but another man came by. He was-oh, he was skin and bone. And he stopped right there in front of me. He undid what was holding his trousers, he let them fall, he squatted down, and he began to defecate right in front of me. And I couldn't believe this. Oh, he was so thin, it looked like the bones of his buttocks would come through the skin. But I stood there saying, no, no. You don't do this in public. Where's your dignity?

But you see, that was my hang-up. I was hung up on something called dignity when that man was merely trying to survive. He wanted to live. I didn't know.

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I was sent as part of a liaison group to see if we could arrange for a camp site for our unit. And we arrived in this place called Weimar and drove out to, what I found out now, was to be a concentration camp. And I didn't know anything about concentration camps.

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Witnesses, Bystanders and Beneficiaries in Hungary

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Witnesses, Bystanders and Beneficiaries in Hungary

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This film focuses on Benjamin Ferencz, a former prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials who is dedicated to preventing mass atrocities.

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This film focuses on Benjamin Ferencz, a former prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials who is dedicated to preventing mass atrocities.

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A dozen rare, never before seen color photos from the first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau, were released to the Internet in early 2013. The images, said to be from 1933 - the year Dachau was created - were posted without attribution but were authenticated by an expert who said they were "quite similar" to photos taken by US soldiers after they liberated Dachau in 1945.

Click Any Image to Enlarge:

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Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism.