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Oxford LibGuides: WWI Primary Resource Guide: Children, family life and civilian experiences of WWI

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This guide aims to highlight a range of key primary resources relevant to the British experience of WWI.

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Drs Stacy Gillis and Emma Short draw on surviving schoolwork and propaganda to explore how World War One affected all aspects of children's lives.

Interest in how non-combatants experienced the First World War has grown substantially in the last 30 years. Children were particularly impacted by the war through disruption to home life and to schooling, absent parents, and deaths of family and family friends. While such experiences were common on the Home Front, children often struggled to understand the reasons behind these events, and the impact upon them was sustained in different, and often more emotional, ways.

Children and the War - a book for young people

A book of patriotic readings addressed to school children, published in 1917 in Italy.

Usage terms: Public Domain

Perceptions challenged

The figure of the child is one that challenges popular perceptions of the war. It is a figure that is complex and shifting in terms of the way it operates within discourses of empire, war and nationhood, yet it is a figure that is often unnoticed or dismissed as not participating or not able to understand the complexities of war. Yet archival material on propaganda directed at children, such as the Italian book for schoolboys, I ragazzi e la Guerra [Children and the War] (1917), along with children's own writing about their experiences of war, such as the poem written by 11-year old Anny Politzer, 'Der heimkehrende Krieger' ['The Returning Soldier'] (1914-18), suggests that some children occupied an engaged position in relation to the war.

The returning soldier - Poem by an 11 year old schoolgirl

Poem written by an 11-year-old school girl about a returning soldier walking through Vienna.

Such material can help us to explore questions of how understandings of the figure of the child are tied up in the shifting positions of adulthood in war, as well as how representations of the child were complicit in restructuring attitudes towards war. The material held in these collections demonstrates that children did not keep diaries in the same way as adults, or that this material has not survived - where we can trace the impact of war on children, however, is primarily in schoolwork and in drawings.

Children's schoolwork

In a collection of school essays, published in 1915, The World War and Personal Expressions by Children: 150 German School Essays, students discuss their experience of war through the events that they have experienced - for example, saying goodbye to their father, news of missing or killed family members, celebrations after a victory, or the constant sound of bombs. What is also clear from this is how deeply children are influenced by propaganda - for example, they anticipate a victory through the cultural and educational recollection of past German victories. Here, then, we have evidence of how children are both products of propaganda and also producers of the same. An Austrian essay, 'How I made a nightly attack on London with my Zeppelin', is a story written by a child imagining successfully attacking London . We can see that new technologies were often a source of excitement for children, so that which is figured in adult writing about the war as a source of terror or fear, is, in children's writing, a source of interest and excitement.

Similarly, the boys of Princeton Street Elementary School in London wrote of their impressions of airship raids and these essays offer crucial insight into how the UK was not at all prepared for airship attacks. These boys express both excitement and fear during the airship raids, and satisfied their curiosity by going out to inspect the damage once the raids were over. The war was also introduced into school lessons in ways that might not be immediately obvious. Arithmetic questions, such as those included in the German textbook Krigsrechenaufgaben [War Calculation Tasks]

(1916) , were loosely based around the successes of the German army - so for example, calculations about the amount of wool needed to knit gift parcels for the troops or calculating the length of row of prisoners beside a railway line. Here the war is used not as a subject for teaching, but as a background example, indicating the pervasiveness of the war to everyday lives.

Domestic invasion

Children's lives were often expected to continue as normal, and the French photograph 'Mère et enfant munies d'un masque à gaz' ['Mother and child wearing gas masks'] shows a child helping her mother cook, but the insertion of the gas mask here is indicative of anxieties surrounding the development of long-range weapons and advances in chemical warfare. It indicates how the domestic space of the home was also a potential site of invasion, and the way in which the child was thus positioned as a combatant in the war. That these writings and images come from France, Italy, Austria, Germany and the UK indicate how the figure of the child is one that crosses borders and boundaries, both imaginary and physical, in wartime.

Usage terms: Public Domain

Written by Stacy Gillis

Dr Stacy Gillis is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the School of English at Newcastle University. She was the Principal Investigator for the Approaching War: Childhood, Culture and the First World War Leverhulme International Network. She is currently working on a book about the rise of the British detective novel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and her research interests include the First World War, feminist theory and popular fictions of the fin-de-siècle.

Dr Emma Short is a Research and Teaching Associate in the School of English at Newcastle University, and was the Network Facilitator for the International Leverhulme Network, Approaching War: Childhood, Culture and the First World War. Her current research considers Gertrude Bell's literary heritage and the making of the modern Middle East, and reveals the lasting impact of Bell's own literary and cultural imagination on the Middle East's place in the British cultural and political imaginary.

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Drs Stacy Gillis and Emma Short draw on surviving schoolwork and propaganda to explore how World War One affected all aspects of children's lives. Interest in how non-combatants experienced the First World War has grown substantially in the last 30 years.

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Many British children were very keen to lend a hand.

They took on jobs, grew vegetables and raised money.

They wanted to support their fathers and older brothers who were away fighting on the front line.

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Many British children were very keen to lend a hand. They took on jobs, grew vegetables and raised money. They wanted to support their fathers and older brothers who were away fighting on the front line.

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The Great Depression (1929-1939) was the worst economic downturn in modern history. The preceding decade, known as the " Roaring Twenties," was a time of relative affluence for many middle- and working-class families. As the economy boomed, new innovations allowed for more leisure time and the creation of a consumer society. But the economic depression that followed those boon years profoundly affected the daily life of American families, in ways large and small.

Even the affluent faced severe belt-tightening.

Four years after the 1929 stock market crash, during the bleakest point of the Great Depression, about a quarter of the U.S. workforce was unemployed. Those that were lucky enough to have steady employment often saw their wages cut or their hours reduced to part-time.

Even upper-middle-class professionals, such as doctors and lawyers, saw their incomes drop by as much as 40 percent. Families who had previously enjoyed economic security suddenly faced financial instability or, in some cases, ruin.

The average American family lived by the Depression-era motto: "Use it up, wear it out, make do or do without." Many tried to keep up appearances and carry on with life as close to normal as possible while they adapted to new economic circumstances.

Households embraced a new level of frugality in daily life. They kept kitchen gardens, patched worn-out clothes and passed on trips to the movies as they privately struggled to retain ownership of a home or automobile.

Potlucks and 'thrift gardens' were the norm.

Women's magazines and radio shows taught Depression-era homemakers how to stretch their food budget with casseroles and one-pot meals. Favorites included chili, macaroni and cheese, soups, and chipped beef on toast.

Potlucks, often organized by churches, became a popular way to share food and a cheap form of social entertainment.

Many families strived for self-sufficiency by keeping small kitchen gardens with vegetables and herbs. Some towns and cities allowed for the conversion of vacant lots into community "thrift gardens" where residents could grow food.

Between 1931 and 1932, Detroit's thrift garden program provided food for about 20,000 people. Experienced gardeners could be seen helping former office workers-still dressed in white button-down shirts and slacks-to cultivate their plots.

Board games and miniature golf courses thrived.

The average American family didn't have much extra income to spend on leisure activities during the 1930s. Before the Depression, going to the movie theater was a major pastime. Fewer Americans could afford this luxury after the stock market crashed-so more than one-third of the cinemas in America closed between 1929 and 1934.

Often, people chose to spend time at home. Neighbors got together to play cards, and board games such as Scrabble and Monopoly-both introduced during the 1930s-became popular.

The radio also provided a free form of entertainment. By the early 1930s, many middle-class families owned a home radio. Comedy programs such as Amos 'n' Andy, soap operas, sporting events and swing music distracted listeners from everyday struggles.

Mini-golf became a Depression-era craze. More than 30,000 miniature golf links sprang up across the country during the 1930s. Prices ranged from 25 to 50 cents per round.

Women entered the workforce in increasing numbers.

Some families maintained a middle-class income by adding an extra wage earner. Despite widespread unemployment during the Depression years, the number of married women in the workforce actually increased.

Some people criticized married women for taking jobs when so many men were out of work, though women often took clerical or service industry positions that weren't seen as socially acceptable for men at the time.

Women found work as secretaries, teachers, telephone operators and nurses. But in many cases, employers paid women workers less than their male counterparts.

Families on government support were less stigmatized.

The New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt meant the expansion of government into people's everyday lives after 1933. Many Americans received some level of financial aid or employment as a result of New Deal programs.

Prior to the Great Depression, most Americans had negative views of government welfare programs and refused to go on welfare. In some towns, local newspapers published the names of welfare recipients.

While attitudes toward government assistance began to change during the Great Depression, going on welfare was still viewed as a painful and humiliating experience for many families.

Economic hardship caused family breakdowns.

The stress of financial strain took a psychological toll-especially on men who were suddenly unable to provide for their families. The national suicide rate rose to an all-time high in 1933.

Marriages became strained, though many couples could not afford to separate. Divorce rates dropped during the 1930s though abandonments increased. Some men deserted their families out of embarrassment or frustration: This was sometimes called a "poor man's divorce."

It's estimated that more than two million men and women became traveling hobos. Many of these were teens who felt they had become a burden on their families and left home in search of work.

Riding the rails-illegally hopping on freight trains-became a common, yet dangerous way to travel. Those traveling the country in search of work often camped in " Hoovervilles," shantytowns named after Herbert Hoover, president during the early years of the Great Depression.

Crime was mythologized, but this was largely hype.

Famous outlaw duo Bonnie and Clyde went on a two-year bank robbing spree across America, while in New Jersey, famous aviator Charles Lindbergh 's toddler son was abducted, held for ransom and then murdered.

High-profile events like these, broadcast through radio announcements and in newspaper headlines, contributed to a sense of lawlessness and crime in the Great Depression, stoking fears that hard times had created a crime wave. But this was more hype than reality.

Violent crimes initially spiked during the first few years of the Great Depression, but nationwide, rates of homicides and violent crimes began to fall sharply between 1934 and 1937-a downward trend that continued until the 1960s.

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Life for the Average Family During the Great Depression | HISTORY

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The Great Depression, the worst economic downturn in modern history, profoundly affected the daily life of American families in ways large and small.

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Greetings, friends! I'll try not to make this into a rant :-), but with all of the modern technologies of today and media ads running amuck telling us we need this, that and the other thing, I think we often forget just how good we've got it. So, in order to lovingly remind you (and myself) of all of our blessings, I thought I'd share some tidbits of stories from the Great Depression. If you like these, you can find more at the Ohio Department of Aging Website.

Food, Cooking and Eating During the Great Depression

"We grew all our own vegetables. We had our own orchard. We had our own cows, had milk, made our own butter, did a lot of canning. My mother at one time had over 800 jars in the basement of jams, jellies, meat, fruits, vegetables, all these different things. We ate very comfortably because we ate from our own supplies.

Many of my classmates did not have families that were well prepared for the difficulties of acquiring food as our family was. Many of them had small gardens or none at all. There were things that we could share, but there was not much more we could do for them."
- Dean Bailey, age 82, Lordstown

"Eating was different in those days, too. We didn't come to a table and complain because the food wasn't what we liked. There were not many choices. We ate or went without. Some days bread and gravy tasted very good."
- Maxine Bartelt, age 85, Columbus

"I lived through The Great Depression and can remember eating beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner when I was four years old but at least we had something to eat. Others didn't. "
- Marty Bryan, age 82, Columbus

"One day while pushing me in the baby carriage from South Euclid to East Cleveland for a visit to my paternal Grandparents Lewis they passed a hot dog stand. Mother said, they could smell the aroma from a distance: 'The closer we got the more hungry we were!' She longed to try one or split one with my dad.

They searched their pockets for the required 10 cents to no avail. Passing the stand they could only continue their walk with their baby hoping for a snack upon arrival at grandma's house. Many years later my mother recalled that day saying, 'Now I can eat in any restaurant I choose and order anything I wish for, but when the memories of that hot dog stand revisit my mind, I must say, I wish I could be as enthusiastic now as I was then.'
- Marilyn Markle, age 79, North Royalton

Recommended Reading: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Later, a friend I worked with said in the Depression he rode the rails and stopped to eat vegetables out of a garden. The owner said he would shoot him if he didn't stop. My friend said 'go ahead,' as he was that hungry. "
- James Randolph, Columbus

"I was 94 on Jan. 8, 2009. My son took 11 of our family to a local restaurant for lunch. I told him what that lunch cost would have bought seven or eight months of groceries in the 1930s. Food was a serious item. Plain and filling.

White navy soup beans was a favorite. We had a neighbor that liked to hunt, but he couldn't afford the shells for his gun. My mother paid for his shells and he gave her the rabbits and squirrels he got - sometimes a raccoon. There were no deer or wild turkeys then. Everyone planted a garden. Some public land was made into garden plots - the Victory gardens were born.

Along the road were elderberry, black and red raspberries and walnut - paw-paw - chestnut trees. We gathered greens - dandelion, polk, water crest. We had a cookbook '100 Ways to Stretch One Pound of Hamburger.'

Depression Cake - flour - sugar - cocoa - baking powder - water - 9 x 12 pan - a heavy chocolate cake. When you ate a piece, it stayed with you. Home-made root beer - It was all very hard work and time consuming. But not too many were overweight. Mostly very healthy."
- Margaret Smith, age 94, Barnesville

"We grew corn, popcorn, potatoes, tomatoes on one acre garden. We ate a lot of popcorn for dinner the first few years"
- Don Trietsch, age 89, Centerville

Schools and Education During the Great Depression

"Mother stressed education to all of us - when one of us received academic recognition, it made the rest work harder. I was the only one who won a scholarship and went to college straight from high school. The others worked one or two years, saved money, then went to college. Five of us attained degrees from The Ohio State University and one from Kent State.

My older sister had her two-year teaching degree, taught in a one-room school - paid for plumbing into the kitchen (our teenage brother dug the ditch) and finished her four-year degree during the summers."
- Rita Anderson, age 87, Reynoldsburg

"What I remember most is my high school days 1932-1936. We never received new books issued to us. At the end of the school term, we would all get a book, scotch tape and eraser. It was our job to mend the book, erase any marks and make the book presentable so that the next class could use them without trouble."
- Pauline Bandzk, age 91, Hubbard

"When I started school there were no yellow school buses. We walked to a one room school for eight years. The teacher had about twenty-five pupils, and she taught all the subjects in all eight grade levels. She received eight hundred dollars for eight months of teaching plus five dollars a month for being her own janitor.

We would go to a neighbor's house near the school and get a bucket of water each day. We all used a communal dipper for a drink."
- Mary Cole, age 91, Cadiz

"Mom and her siblings, except for (her brother) Paul, only made it to sixth grade, and then it was only part-time. They had to share books and clothes, so each kid could go to school one day a week, maybe even two weeks. Only Paul went back years later and got his GED... Mom was an avid reader until she died at age 80.

She read everything she could get her hands on. She even kept a small dictionary with her to look up words she didn't know or understand. Her two favorite books were her dictionary and her bible."
- Joyce M. Pack, age 69, Toldedo

Self-Sufficiency, Resourcefulness and Frugality

"For a refrigerator we used an empty gallon can with a rope tied to it, which we lowered down a dug well to sit on the top of the water. That would cool a pound of bologna... For a while before we had electricity, we heated the irons that we used to do the ironing on the cook stove. We bathed in a large wash tub that was also used to wash our laundry...

Naturally, this was before air conditioning. So, during a very hot summer in, I believe, 1936 or '37 we slept on the front lawn. It was just too uncomfortable to sleep upstairs... Also, when our car or truck tires got a hole in the tread, we inserted a 'boot' which consisted of a piece of an old tire to cover the hole. That was before tubeless tires."
- Lester Baiman, age 82, Colton, CA (formerly of Hamilton)

"During the Depression we had many door-to-door salesman. One singer sewing machine salesman, after a negative response to his sales pitch, offered to leave the sewing machine for a trial period. My mother sewed from morning till night all that week, turning my dad's frayed shirt collars and cutting her cloths down to fit me.

When the salesman came back, she said she hadn't changed her mind, she still didn't want the machine. Little did he know how much it had been used."
- Mildred Redman Dieter, age 81, Youngstown

Recommended Reading: Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man

"My dad and older brothers would set larger traps in the banks of the ditch that ran along the 1 acre of property in the fall and winter, every morning and evening. They would check the traps to see if they caught any muskrats or rabbits.

They would bring any animals like that home and carefully skin the animals and turn the skins inside out and put them on wooden or metal stretchers to dry. Then, when they had 15-20 skins dried, they sold them to furriers, men who bought them to make fur collars or jackets to keep warmer. Back then, you'd be lucky to get from 50 cents to $1 each.

Then, the meat was cleaned out and soaked in salt water and cooked, or there were people who would pay my dad 25¢ or 50¢ each for the meat."
- Ruth Hahn-Shrayer, age 78, Holland

"During the winter, we disconnected the refrigerator to save electricity and kept spoilable food in a window 'icebox.' You opened the window to put food in, and then closed the window to keep it cold. We didn't have freezers then yet."
- Thomas Rosmarin, age 85, Columbus

"In the thirties, Mom and Dad had their hands full financially raising us five children. Dad only worked two days a week at Goodyear - these days they call it rotating. Mom was an excellent seamstress, but was short on funds for buying sewing material.

A friend of Dad's worked at an auto wrecking yard. He volunteered to cut the headliner out of quality cars, so Mom had all the material she could use, thanks to Packards and Cadillacs."
- Robert Schwalbach, age 82, Akron

"And, my mother made soap. The hard soap I remember had an unpleasant smell and was tan in color. The soft soap was a gelatin-like goo. These were used in the washing machine. We did have 'store bought' soap for our bathing."
- Thelma Thomas, age 87, Port Clinton

"We had no cellar to store our canned food in and my dad would make a place in the garden where he would pile up straw or hay. He would put vegetables in a pile then he would put more hay or straw on them. Then, he would put burlap sacks and old coats on top of that. He would cover it all with some soil and in the winter he could dig in it and get vegetables to eat and they kept very well."
- Charles Warrick, age 81, Barnesville

"An EVICTION notice! With a family of four boys and after nineteen years of backbreaking work, Mom and Dad had a huge new problem - EVICTION. Dad asked a friend who sold real estate, 'Any farms you can't sell?' 'Lots,' the realtor replied. "Let's look them over." After a selection was made, Dad asked the realtor what his commission would be.

The realtor responded. "5 percent." Dad had no money to pay either a down payment or a realtor's commission, but offered instead 'a note' as payment-in-full for the 5 percent. This was a 'first' for the realtor, but he knew that if Dad ever got the money, he'd be paid, and if Dad never paid it, they'd at least had a nice visit together.

"They went to a savings and loan where the realtor said that yes, he had been paid in full and that amount met the required 5 percent down payment. The loan was completed. We had a house to live in. Our family then moved to eighty-three acres that could barely grow thistles and with a shabby house that the wind blew through.

All the household furnishings were moved on an open wagon along with what was left of the livestock, three weary horses and some heavily used farm machinery.

"Very quickly after settling in, Dad planned how to pay off his debts with no thought of declaring bankruptcy. First he went to the feed mill and asked how he could work off that bill. The owner was unsure; no one had ever made such an offer before. But, after months of Dad's hard work, we had a clean slate at the feed mill.

Then, on to the lumber yard, where he received a definite 'no.' The owner didn't need help because he wasn't selling anything. Nonplussed, Dad asked, 'Do you have any paint you can't sell?' 'Sure,' the owner replied. 'Lots.' Then, Dad asked, "If I scrape and paint all your buildings, would you consider my bill paid in full?"

They shook hands, and Dad started scraping and painting. He said he hadn't realized how many buildings were in a lumberyard, but finally another bill was paid and he had made another friend."
- George K. Weimer, Jr., age 77, Sebring

Recommended Reading: The Richest Man in Babylon

"My dear mother would cause us to laugh with tears when she would tell about the census taker who received a negative to every question: Do you have inside plumbing? Central heating? Running water? Refrigeration? Gas or electric stove? Telephone?" Finally, he asked 'well lady, what do you have?'"
- Clark Biddle, age 82, Hilliard

"We learned to do so many things: wash, mend and sew our own clothes; grow and can food; plan ahead; stretch our money; keep warm; help each other. Other people helped us, too. Friends took us on errands when we needed to go where they were going (we usually had no car). Clothes were given to us, and sometimes food and garden surplus. And we tried to help others meet their needs, too."
- Margaret B. Edwards, age 89, Gibsonburg

"We didn't have much money to spend, but on the other hand there wasn't much that we needed to spend our money on. Most every family had a garden. Fruit trees were plentiful, especially apples. Most were free for the picking. I remember an orchard on Libby Road where we picked apples that my grandma peeled for use in pies and sauces.

Chickens provided meat for Sunday dinner and eggs for breakfast. When a piece of meat was purchased at the butcher shop, the butcher would throw in a free soup bone and a piece of liver. Add some homemade noodles and a delicious meal was almost free.

Many of the expensive things we find so necessary today were either not available or not yet in such widespread use as to be considered a necessity."
- John W. Straka, Jr., age 91, Maple Heights

"We felt so lucky. We didn't know we were poor. We grew everything on the farm and butchered our own meat and smoked it or canned it. We made our own apple butter, churned our butter. We made cottage cheese and maple syrup, and bottled root beer. We had our underclothes made out of bleached feed sacks. We worked in the garden and shelled corn until our hands had blisters."
- Maxine Vargo, age 80, Akron

"We really didn't feel a lack of money in our young lives because we were raised to be satisfied with what we had. Recycling was a way of life for us. We could even make money by returning bottles to the store. My father used to sing, 'The Best Things in Life Are Free.' This was the philosophy that carried us through the Depression."
- Manila Fellows, age 84, Youngstown

"My father cut logs and built a 'temporary' cabin where we lived for nearly ten years. It was 14 feet by 28 feet, and by the time my youngest sister was born there, it contained two adults and eight children. Dad built hanging bunks from the four corners; the center great room was the cooking, eating, living and entertaining space.

We managed. I remember the day we moved in, torrents of rain pointed out the unfinished holes in the roof. the windows were still only grain sacks, and Mother and I scrambled for all the pots and kettles to catch the dripping water.

Things improved, of course, as we all pitched in, kids gathering moss to stuff in the cracks and Dad continuing to finish things. We all have wonderful memories of the cozy family times there."
- Margaret Vail, age 86, Mansfield

Jobs, Schemes and Other Ways to Make Money

"As I grew up, I had a variety of jobs. My father had three jobs at times, in a steel mill, a screw factory and did side work, concrete sidewalks and driveways and other things. My mother, while we were small, was a housewife.
For real ways to make extra money, check out this article sharing 50 Great Side Hustles
I worked in a shoe shop, washed cars and worked in a bakery. I shined shoes on Madison Ave., from west 73rd St. to west 110th St. I would go to public square on weekends and shine shoes in front of the terminal tower. As I got older, I delivered all three newspapers (Plain Dealer, News, Press) at old St. John Hospital before and after school. On Saturday and Sunday, I would shave old men patients at the hospital."
- Daniel P. Gentile, Sr., age 70, Parma

"We were a family of eight and my father was a carpenter. During the Depression there was almost no building going on. Because of this, my father had very little work. When he did work, the owner of the company was often unable to pay him. and my mother would go to him and have to beg for a couple dollars to buy necessities, like flour, to help her feed the family.

My sister and I peddled papers in Zoar. We also had to clean the two-room school every day after school. My oldest brother had to go to school early every day and build a fire in the downstairs and upstairs stoves so the school was warm when it started. In the summer, we would sell bouquets of wild violets for a nickel to people visiting Zoar.

Around 1930, the Zoar Dance Hall was built. At 15 and 16 years old, my sister and I got jobs working there selling tickets and making sandwiches. We would walk home alone at 2 or 3 in the morning. As with all our jobs, the money went to our parents. If we found a penny, we thought we really had something."
- Irene Class Haueter, age 94, Bolivar

"When I was 7 years old - my mother and dad opened a grocery store and ice cream parlor. My father was the first taxidermist on the west side of Cleveland. Mom and Dad were in the business for years. The best thing was that they were generous to people who were poor. Mom put their names in a book and how much they bought.

Some moved and never paid her back. Dad gave away deer meat, fish, rabbit and squirrel meat to anyone who came in his store and needed food."
- Marcella Huber, age 85, Medina

"To make a buck, we would sell newspapers for the Telegram News. We would sell old rags and scrap iron, bottles and aluminum to the scrap man. We would caddie for doctors, attorneys and their wives. In early spring, we would rake the leaves and trim the hedges, and in the winter, we would shovel snow.

They would feed us and give us out-grown toys, such as bikes, skates, wagons and sleighs. They were good to us. Farmers would have work for some of us. They were cheap payers and we walked five miles to the farms. The little money we made, we gave to our parents to help out."
- Joe Trolio, age 83, Hubbard

Family, Community and Kindness Toward Strangers

"We helped our neighbors and they in turn helped you. We went to church, I walked about three miles to go and my Mom and I would chat with our neighbors. Back then, everyone helped each other."
- Patarica LeMay Hauger, age 81, Meigs County

"In fact, together (our parents) raised nine children, who may have lacked occasionally from material things. But, there was always food on the table, plenty of playmates and a piece of pie for anyone who stopped by. Mom and Dad worked hard to make ends meet and strove to instill the values of hard work, honesty, and morality into their brood.

To this day, Mom stubbornly refuses still to pick a favorite child, saying instead, 'I love them all.' And when a son or daughter might try to point out an occasional character flaw in Dad, her instant defense, with a twinkle in her eye, would always be, 'I coulda done worse!'"
- Mary Inbody about her mother, Dorotha Inbody, age 94, Findlay

"My dad had a Victory Garden on Detroit Rd. during the Depression. From that, he loaded the tables for all our neighbors, and he loved it. It was quite a bit of work for his garden, as we had to haul large bottles of water out there to keep the plants alive.

I was a slim girl in those days, and the bottles of water were heavy... but when I knew that this garden meant so much to him, I gladly did it. I am now 88 years old, and still happy I did that."
- Jean Lee, age 88, via e-mail

"My parents and I lived across the street from the 'hobo camp.' The neighborhood kids and I would go there and eat with them and listen to the stories they had to tell. They were family men looking for work wherever they could find it. They would come to our door asking for a potato or whatever food we could spare - Always offering to do work for it. We didn't have much, but my mother always gave them a little something."
- Jeannette Mellott, age 78, Plymouth

Lessons, Values and Advice from the Great Depression

"Am I glad to have lived through the Great Depression? Yes. I learned to appreciate the simple life and to have compassion for those truly in need."
- June M. Baden, age 79, Westerville

"I wouldn't change any of these experiences even if I could. It was more enjoyable than you can ever imagine. I have come to appreciate what a wonderful opportunity my family had to grow up poor in the back woods of West Virginia deprived of nothing that was truly important, and blessed with everything we really needed."
- Betty Banta, age 80, Columbus

"I learned from my father that I should pay myself first and save a portion of everything I earn; to save not just for what I want, but for what I might need; to not spend what I don't have - but to wait until I can afford it whatever it is.

I learned that before agreeing to work, I should know what I will be paid, to determine if my time and labor will be best spent in this endeavor. Finally, I learned that there are times when anyone, including me, might need help, and, recognizing this, when others need help, I must step forward, if I am able, and be the helper."
- Stanley L. Blum, age 79, Dayton

"From these humble beginnings, each of us children survived and grew up to have families of our own. In my case, I helped raise three generations of children. Early lessons of the importance of family helped me maintain my perspective during these times. I am grateful for the love and support of my family during our current economic downturn.

The lessons of my life have taught me that things can always be worse and can always be better than they are today."
- Marty Bryan, age 82, Columbus

"Yes times were tough and hard, but you know what? Between yesteryears and today, I would go back to that again because you learned how to survive."
- George Campbell, age 74, Cleveland

Then v. Now

"Today we live in a disposable society: Use it and throw it out, buy more. Most foods are prepackaged. Immediate gratification prevails. We no longer know how to do very basic things for ourselves. We depend on money and others to make our lives fulfilling and happy. Financially, old times were tough, and I'm sure my parents worried, but basically I think we were much happier and healthier in that lifestyle."
- Paula Deatrick Ashton, age 69, Toledo

"In spite of the hardships, which we were unaware of, we survived and thrived without public assistance. There was no social security or Medicare... There were very few beauty parlors, restaurants, motels. We never ate out, as it cost twice as much to eat out as to cook your own meals... Automobiles were scarce and a new one could be bought in 1939 for $810.

Today, people have two or three sitting in their driveways. There are many millionaires today, but during the Depression one could scarcely be found. Today, tour agencies can take you to far-flung places that we never dreamed of seeing. We were lucky to get to go to the county fair. There, everyone got all dressed up in the best.

Now, fairs are smaller and geared mostly to 4H exhibits. During the Depression, people were lucky to have two outfits to wear. Often, they were hand-me-downs or made from feed sacks. Everything was put to use. Today, most people have closets packed with clothes. Each season they go out and buy more...

People today take exercise classes for fitness. We got our exercise from the sweat of the brow. We got our tanning from picking berries or making hay. Children were brought up more strictly. There was a great deal of discipline. Today many children are allowed free reign. Back in those days, neighbor helped neighbor, borrowed machinery and the like.

Today, people would rather buy prepared foods or eat out at restaurants, where many of the patrons are overweight, and it is quite costly. Sports events are big time now. Coaches and players alike are paid millions of dollars, and thousands of fans seem to be able to afford seats to the events.

During the Depression, baseball games were held in farmers' fields or on school playgrounds, with little money involved. You just had the price of the ball and bat."
- Mary Cole, age 91, Cadiz

"A great gift of the era was to be able to lie on the grass under a tree, day or evening, with a clear mind and imagination - an experience unlike today's technologies."
- Helen De Gifis, age 83, Warren

"We did have a lot of company. People did visit more then. We didn't have TV, and very few had radio. We also didn't have a phone. We learned to save for things we needed. No charge cards. We had a grocer on the corner of the street where we had a bill. If we couldn't pay for food, it was put on our bill and was paid whenever we had a few extra dollars.

Thanks to parents who taught us the value of hard work and saving what we can. We respected our parents and elders, which is lacking today."
- Theresa Giallombardo, age 80, Maple Heights
I hope you enjoyed this extra-long post. I never tire of reading these stories, as they remind me of what it is to be grateful for what you have, instead of always wanting more. They remind me that, not so long ago, this was an entirely different country, an entirely different world. When the temptation comes to wish for what others have, or to lament that you don't have enough, remember these stories from Great Depression, and remember that no matter what you have or don't have, there are millions of people elsewhere who have it a whole lot worse. For people in many countries, stories like those from above ring all too true, even today.
"I grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. We lived in a very poor tenement house. But in all of my memories, the one that sticks out the most was not the poverty, but the importance of honesty and trust. Locks on doors were not needed. No one stole from another. We helped, not harmed, other people.

The whole neighborhood was suffering together. We would not harm each other. Our family and our good name was what mattered."
- Edna Hanson, age 76, Toledo

"I feel sorry for the younger generation, as they don't know how to make do with nothing. My Mom taught me how to cook and I have taught my daughter and son to cook and do it without much. Thank God they have jobs, and I pray they will always have them until this awful mess is cleared up. Too bad most people now day don't even know their next-door neighbors.

We are spoiled rotten and our grandchildren are, also. I can hear them say: 'I want my kids to have more than I did.' That's natural, I guess, but I was 10 years old before I had a doll for Christmas; we always got a pair of socks or stockings which came up above your knee. I hated them and I would roll them down around my ankles."
- Patarica LeMay Hauger, age 81, Meigs County

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Stories from the Great Depression - The Frugal Farmer

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Greetings, friends! I'll try not to make this into a rant :-), but with all of the modern technologies of today and media ads running amuck telling us we need this, that and the other thing, I think we often forget just how good we've got it.

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"Growing Up in Down Times: Children of the Great Depression"

This essay provides historical perspective on the social, political, and economic circumstances of the Great Depression. It suggests some ways the hard times of the 1930s affected young people and left their mark on them as adults.

The United States' dynamic capitalist economy has been a rollercoaster of booms and busts, sparing no generation from its astonishing dips and climbs. New markets, products, and efficiencies have enabled many Americans to live comfortably and sometimes acquire great wealth, yet the nation has also suffered severe economic downturns throughout its history. Depressions were regular occurrences in the industrializing nineteenth century, striking at least once every decade except for the 1860s (which was visited by civil war). Generally understood as prolonged business slumps causing widespread unemployment, depressions are no less devastating for being so common. And most devastating of all in terms of its length and depth was the Great Depression of the 1930s. It began just before the stock market crash of 1929 and ended with the outbreak of World War II in 1941. In between, fifteen million Americans, a quarter of the work force, lost their jobs. Millions more lost their homes, farms, businesses, and life savings.

Historians still disagree about the causes of the depression, or rather about which combination of causes was most critical. Contributing factors generally include the overproduction of crops and manufactured goods, or their under-consumption due to low wages and the limited purchasing power of ordinary families. At the same time easy credit and overconfidence born of the prosperous 1920s prompted investors large and small to play the stock market like a carnival game and carry more personal debt than was prudent. Additionally, high tariffs and mismanagement of foreign debts stemming from the First World War stifled international trade. And an environmental crisis - partly natural and partly man-made - ravaged the Great Plains, stirring up droughts and dust storms that drove thousands of tenant farmers off their land. The resulting hardships can be glimpsed in iconic photographs of the period showing gaunt-faced migrant families driving west in over-packed jalopies; gangs of boys hopping freight trains in search of work; endless breadlines wrapped around city blocks, somber picketers demanding food, jobs, or housing; and angry strikers clashing with police.

An inability to reassure a battered public, let alone turn the economy around, led to the defeat of an immensely popular president, Herbert Hoover, and an end to the Republican Party's twelve-year reign in the White House. In his first hundred days in office in 1933, Hoover's successor, New York Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, launched a host of programs to aid farmers, workers, homeowners, and the unemployed. He repealed Prohibition, reformed the monetary system, and restored people's confidence in banks. Aided by a formidable first lady - Eleanor Roosevelt, economic advisers nicknamed "the brain trust," and a powerful new medium - radio, which enabled him to speak directly to the public, Roosevelt offered a route to recovery. Conservatives still argue that his liberal "New Deal" policies and support for labor unions actually delayed recovery, but without a doubt his actions helped keep millions of Americans and their hopes alive.

There are two schools of thought about the impact of the Great Depression on children. One school holds that the hard times left young people physically damaged and psychologically scarred. The other insists that the decade of dire want and desperate wandering served to strengthen their character and forge what became America's "greatest generation" of the World War II era. In fact, children's experience of the depression varied widely, depending on their age, race, sex, region, and individual family circumstances. Nevertheless, certain patterns have emerged. Demographically, birthrates fell during the decade to a low of 18 births per 1,000 population, and children's health declined due to the poorer nutrition and health care available.

Economically, many children worked both inside and outside the home; girls babysat or cleaned house, boys hustled papers or shined shoes, and both ran errands and picked crops. Yet the scarcity of jobs led record numbers of children to remain in school longer. Socially, high school became a typical teenage experience for the first time. A record 65 percent of teens attended high school in 1936; they spent the better part of their days together, forming their own cliques and looking to each other for advice and approval. Thus arose the idea of a separate, teenage generation.

Politically, the state began to play a larger role in children's lives. The federal government established day-care centers, supplied school lunches, built playgrounds, swimming pools, and ball fields. The 1935 Social Security Act provided aid for rural, disabled, and dependent children, while the Civilian Conservation Corps and National Youth Administration created jobs and educational opportunities for teens. Culturally, young people became a distinct market for comic books featuring Superman and other superheroes, movies starring child stars like Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney, and Disney cartoons introducing Mickey Mouse and the Three Little Pigs, whose theme song, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" became an anthem of the era.

Source | Vincent DiGirolamo, "Growing Up in Down Times: Children of the Great Depression," American Social History Project, February 2007, http://www.ashp.cuny.edu/YA/detail.php?rec_id=140.
Item Type | Article/Essay

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"Growing Up in Down Times: Children of the Great Depression" · SHEC: Resources for Teachers

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This essay provides historical perspective on the social, political, and economic circumstances of the Great Depression. It suggests some ways the hard times of the 1930s affected young people and left their mark on them as adults. The United States' dynamic capitalist economy has been a rollercoaster of booms and busts, sparing no generation from its astonishing dips and climbs.

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WOODSTOCK, Md., April 20, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- World War II left behind millions of war veterans-some as heroes, others simply lucky to be survivors -- all have their own war stories to tell. Here is an interesting story that gives voices to quite a large group of World War II veterans that not many had heard from: the teenagers whose young ages barely allowed them to get drafted into service. Author Rudy DePaola tells their story through his highly detailed and captivating book, Wings of the Bullet.

Follow Ralph, a typical example of American teen-aged boys who were raised in the Great Depression, in this engaging story. The tragic early Thirties taught Ralph how to survive when even living a simple life required hard work and sacrifice. However, the simple life would not matter anymore: America was attacked and as soon as Ralph and his friends reached the age of seventeen, they signed up for military service.

Leaving family was hard enough, but Ralph, and the thousands of other teenage boys, soon learned that life in the military would be very tough, sometimes merciless. Being a soldier only led to the ultimate crossroad of to kill or be killed, and the journey to that crossroad -- Ralph's training -- was full of humiliation and pain. However, Ralph's war story was not without adventure. After being washed out of all training programs, Ralph and several other cadets were admitted to aerial gunnery school where Ralph was trained to be a gunner for the B-24 "Liberator." His crewmates became his new family.

Rich in detail of the Southwest Pacific stage and captures the raw emotions felt in military training, Wings of the Bullet is a brilliant novel about a teenager's experience of combat in World War II. Author Rudy DePaola has achieved his goal in expressing an understanding of what it is like to be a teen in war. Filled with pictures, maps, and real letters from a teen soldier to home, this novel is a highly recommended read for both war veterans and teenage readers. For more information, log on to www.Xlibris.com.

About the Author

Rudolph "Rudy" DePaola was born in Baltimore, Maryland, July 26, 1925. He enlisted with the U.S. Army Air Corps from high school on July 19, 1943. He took his Basic training at Kessler Field, Biloxi, Mississippi, and later trained at Gunnery School in Harlingen, Texas. His Crew training took place at March Field in Riverside, California. The author later got assigned as tail gunner to Robert E. Grey crew. They picked up a new B-24 bomber at Fairfield Souson, California and prepared to fly it to the Southwest Pacific. Here, DePaola became gravely ill and was left behind. He finally caught up with the crew several weeks later in Nabzab, New Guinea. After combat training missions, he was assigned to a Bomb Group in the 13th Air Force in November, 1944. He flew twenty-five missions from Moratai (in Halmaharas), the Philippines, Borneo, and other islands. After war, DePaola went to college on G.I. Bill. After retiring from public schools, he became a principal in a Catholic High School and, later, an adjunct professor at a local university.

                     WINGS OF THE BULLET * by Rudy DePaola
                       A Story of Young Americans at War
                       Publication Date: March 16, 2006
           Trade Paperback; $15.99; 231 pages; 978-1-4134-9816-5
            Cloth Hardback; $22.99; 231 pages; 978-1-4134-9817-2

Members of the media who wish to review this book may request a complimentary paperback copy by contacting the publisher at (888) 795-4274 x. 7479. To purchase copies of the book for resale, please fax Xlibris at (610) 915-0294 or call (888) 795-4274 x. 7876. For more information, contact Xlibris at (888) 795-4274 or on the web at www.Xlibris.com.

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The Struggles of Young American Soldiers in WWII -- A Riveting Story That Shares Their Exciting and Dangerous Lives

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WOODSTOCK, Md., April 20, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- World War II left behind millions of war veterans-some as heroes, others simply lucky to be survivors -- all have their own war stories to tell.

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National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

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Babe wrote to his family back in Waterbury whenever he could. His mother, a widow, lived for his letters. Every day she would wait on the porch hoping the postman would bring another letter from her middle son. When the letters arrived, they said nothing of the horrors Babe had seen. Instead, he was brief and upbeat:

I am in the best of health and I hope to hear the same from all of you always. Well, things here are moving pretty smooth and the only thing I do is eat and sleep and if I keep it up much longer I'll be a barrel.

Love, Babe

Babe's family believed him. "You see probably on the newsreel or you read about it in the paper about different battles," says Babe's brother, Thomas Ciarlo. "But you don't actually put Babe in that position. At one point . . . my mother had my aunt write a letter in Italian that she had sent to Babe. 'When you get to Rome . . . we have relatives over there. When you get there show them these letters and they'll treat you well.' And at the time, you think, 'Well, yeah, heÕs going to be in Italy. He's going to Rome and he's going to see his relatives.' Can you imagine that? You think about it now and it's so unreal."

Babe's letters stopped coming in June 1944. On June 26, the family received word that Babe, just eight days shy of his twenty-first birthday, had been killed in the battle for Cisterna. Babe's mother refused to accept that her son was dead. For months afterward, she looked at photographs of soldiers in the newspaper and insisted that Babe was among them, alive and fighting.

Babe's story is just one of dozens told by World War II veterans and their families in the NEH-supported seven-part documentary, The War, produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, and written by Geoffrey C. Ward. The film debuts on September 23 on public television.

"World War II veterans are dying at a rate of one thousand a day," says Burns. "Each death is a set of memories, almost like an entire library disappearing. We felt a kind of urgency to learn their stories and record their deeds." In addition to conducting interviews, the filmmakers used letters, photographs, and newspaper accounts, which allowed them to tell the story of the war from a more intimate perspective.

Novick, who calls the documentary "World War II 101," hopes viewers will feel a sense of connection with history. "The story of World War II will never fully be told," she says. "We tried to do it from a different angle, in a way it hasn't been addressed. The people left to tell their own stories are the regular soldiers, the 'grunts,' who fought in the war. We really wanted to make a film that would honor their experiences and sacrifice."

To frame their story, Burns and Novick rejected focusing on celebrity generals or specific fighting units in favor of concentrating on four American towns: Waterbury, Connecticut, known as "Brass City" for the screws, washers, buttons, and many other metal items it produced; Mobile, Alabama, a shipbuilding town divided by race; Luverne, Minnesota, a prairie town with just over three thousand residents; and Sacramento, California, the state capital, surrounded by fertile land and home to almost seven thousand Japanese Americans.

In the fall of 1941, Americans cast anxious eyes on the battles raging across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Nazi Germany, which had devoured Western Europe, was tearing up North Africa and squaring off against the Russians on the Eastern Front. Meanwhile, Japan continued to consolidate its hold on China. The solace provided by distance was broken on December 7, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Soon after, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. America was suddenly at war on two fronts.

In the summer of 1941, sixteen-year-old Glenn Frazier, distraught because the girl he loved confessed her devotion to someone else, ran away from his home in Alabama. He lied to Army recruiters about his age and signed up to serve in the Philippines, thinking he would be safe from the war raging in Europe. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Frazier became one of thirty-one thousand men under the command of General Douglas MacArthur.

As a child, Frazier had been taught that killing was wrong, but after his first taste of war, he was a changed man. When Japanese bombers attacked Manila, Frazier saw a friend killed by a direct hit. "And then when that Japanese zero turned his wings . . . and started to fly away, I could see him with a smile on his face," recalls Frazier. "And at that point, I had no problem with killing people. I got to the point where I hunted them. And if I didn't kill a Japanese in a day, I felt I didn't do my job."

The Americans were soon overwhelmed by the more than Þfty thousand Japanese troops converging on Manila. MacArthur ordered a retreat to the Bataan Peninsula, a mountainous malarial place. Short on supplies, the Americans fought off one Japanese attack after another, waiting for the reinforcements MacArthur said were on the way. The help never came.

After four months, Frazier and the other surviving Americans were taken prisoner. They endured brutal treatment at the hands of their captors, beginning with a forced march through the jungle that came to be known as the Bataan Death March. Frazier survived the march, but spent the remainder of the war in slave labor camps in Japan. One day, on burial detail above a mass grave, he threw his dog tags into the pit. He was certain he would die shortly. ConÞdent that the tags would be found after the war, he wanted to relieve his family of uncertainty about his fate.

When the Allies retook the Philippines, they discovered the mass grave with Frazier's dog tags in it. The Army rightly believed that Frazier was dead and notified his family. Frazier's father, however, refused to believe it. He said, "I'm sure if anybody can make it, my son can make it." Miraculously, Frazier survived his internment. When he returned to the United States at the end of the war, he called home. His mother answered the phone and fainted upon hearing the voice of a son she had been told was dead.

For families like the Ciarlos and the Fraziers, the war meant more than just having a son fighting. It also transformed the home front. The Office of Civil Defense asked every American to become a "fighting unit on the home front." Families were encouraged to grow Victory Gardens, and rationing became a fact of life. Scrap metal, which could be recycled into arms, was in great demand. In Luverne, which had been founded by Civil War veterans, the town council voted to melt down cannonballs from a memorial to Union soldiers. Even bacon fat was valuable-it could be turned into glycerin.

The moribund economy began to boom as "war towns," where factories were retooled to produce the equipment needed for war, sprung up across the country. One such town was Mobile, Alabama, which had been hit hard by the Great Depression. The economic downturn had closed shipyards, shuttered businesses, and forced industrial plants to lay off workers. The war, however, brought back prosperity and infused the city with energy. Gulf Shipbuilding grew from 240 employees in 1940 to more than eleven thousand in 1943. Meanwhile, the workforce at Alabama Dry Dock grew from one thousand workers to almost thirty thousand. Plants ran around the clock and even on Sundays. "Mobile became so crowded in six months that people were living in vacant lots," says Katharine Phillips, who grew up in Mobile and worked during the war at a nursery school for the children of shipyard workers.

The war also brought women into the labor force in droves. By 1943, six million women were employed, nearly half of them in defense plants, including more than four thousand in Mobile. One of them, Emma Belle Petcher, learned to assemble bomber parts with such skill that she was one of two women put in charge of quality control.

While the war created new opportunities and prosperity on the home front, it also exacerbated racism and xenophobia. In Mobile, African Americans who came in search of work in the shipyards were not always welcomed by white shipyard workers, even though there was more than enough work for everybody. Racial tension flared and riots broke out as blacks demanded fair treatment.

Although African American men were drafted to fight for freedom, they were relegated to segregated units. The Army Air Corps created a separate training camp for African-American fighter pilots at the Tuskegee Institute. The U.S. Navy designated the USS Mason an all-black ship, except for its captain. The U.S. Army created the all-black 761st Tank Battalion. When the 761st joined the fight in Europe, General George Patton told them: "I don't care what color you are, so long as you go up there and kill those kraut sonsabitches." The Marine Corps refused to allow blacks in its ranks, until it was confronted with mounting casualties in the Pacific and pressure from civil rights groups. Even then, blacks were placed in segregated units and given mainly support jobs.

For Japanese Americans, the home front became an internment camp. In the hysteria that followed Pearl Harbor, the government forced more than one hundred and ten thousand Japanese Americans living along the West Coast, including roughly seven thousand from Sacramento and the surrounding area, to abandon their homes and businesses and relocate to isolated camps inland, where they lived cramped in bunkhouses behind barbed wire.

"It was middle of the harvest and . . . yet we had to abandon it and leave," says Susumu Satow, whose family grew strawberries, grapes and raspberries on a twenty-acre farm east of Sacramento. "You know this is just the beginning and they may very well send us back to Japan. In my heart I knew my loyalty belongs to America. I went to school, pledged allegiance every morning in grammar school and so forth. To think that I may be sent to Japan was . . . horrendous."

Despite what was happening to their friends and family, young Japanese American men yearned to fight for their country and demonstrate their loyalty. Initially, those who wanted to sign up for combat were rejected as "enemy aliens." The military eventually allowed Japanese Americans to serve as part of a special segregated unit, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. In Hawaii and in the internment camps thousands signed up, including Satow. The 442nd went on to distinguish itself in combat in Europe. One of its members was Daniel Inouye, a highly decorated soldier who later became a U.S. Senator.

By late spring of 1944, there were signs that the tide of the war was turning. The Allies had stopped Japan's expansion in the Pacific, taking Guadalcanal and Tarawara, and ravaged Japan's ßeet at Midway. The Americans and British occupied North Africa and Rome. Allied planes bombed Germany around the clock, while the Russians advanced toward Berlin from the east. Despite Allied advances, Germany retained its grip on Western Europe, girding itself against the long-anticipated invasion of France, while Japan also made it clear that it would Þght to the last man rather than surrendering.

Al McIntosh, editor of Luverne's Rock County Star newspaper, vividly captured the tenor of those times, including the breathless anticipation of what became known as D-Day. On May 25, 1944, McIntosh wrote in his bi-weekly column that:

Outwardly, things haven't changed here. The lilacs are out in full bloom. The countryside was never greener. At night there are a million stars . . . winking in the sky. But things are different. The staffs of daily newspapers all over the country are on alert in case news of the invasion of Europe breaks. Key executives don't stir very far from a telephone day or night. The belief is that the long-awaited flash will come sometime after 11 p.m. but before 5 a.m.

Shortly after midnight on June 6, 1944, the invasion of Western Europe began on the Normandy coast of France. Paratroopers descended behind enemy lines, while thousands of soldiers stormed the beaches. Wave after wave of Allied aircraft attacked German defenses. By day's end, more than one hundred and fifty thousand Allied soldiers had landed on French soil. Nearly twenty-five hundred lay dead. The invasion gave the Allies the foothold they needed and by mid-August, the Germans were in full retreat. On August 25, the Allies liberated Paris.

By June 1944, the Allies dominated the air, strafing and bombing the Germans from American P-47 Thunderbolts. "It was on one of my early missions that I knew I had, I'd killed men," says Quentin Aanenson of Luverne.

We caught a group of Germans that were on a road in an area where there were no trees. And I remem ber the impact it had on me when I could see my bullets just tearing into them. That was my job. This is what I'd been trained to do, and I dealt with it fine. But when I got back home to the base in Normandy and landed I got sick. I had to think about what I had done. Now that didn't change my resolve. I went out and did it again. And again and again and again.

As American and British forces closed in on Berlin, they encountered Nazi Germany's ghoulish project: the concentration camps where Hitler carried out his plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe. "I saw one of those places where they were, where they had the people that were dying," says Dwain Luce, then an army captain from Mobile. "And dead bodies stacked like cordwood. These people in this country who say it didn't happen, it happened. I saw it, I know."

The war in Europe ended in May 1945, following Germany's surrender in the wake of Hitler's suicide. Japan surrendered in August 1945, following the dropping of the atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the invasion of Manchuria by the Soviet Union.

While military and political events ended the war, for the soldiers who fought it and their families, the war was never truly over. "There are casualties in war that never show up as casualties," says Aanenson. "They're internal casualties. We all changed. We went out as a bunch of kids. Wars are fought by kids. And we came back-looked maybe the same but inside we were so different." Although Frazier made it home, he also carried with him for the rest of his life the physical and psychological scars of his wartime experience.

The war left its mark on families as well. More than four hundred thousand soldiers paid for victory with their lives. Babe Ciarlo's mother, still in denial about the death of her son, refused to believe that he was not coming home. He eventually came, but in a casket. "I think the worst day was when they brought his body back," says Babe's sister, Olga. "And we went down to the railroad station and when they took his body off the train and we were all there, we all went to the cemetery, when they handed my mother the flag."

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War Stories: The American People in World War II

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Babe wrote to his family back in Waterbury whenever he could. His mother, a widow, lived for his letters. Every day she would wait on the porch hoping the postman would bring another letter from her middle son. When the letters arrived, they said nothing of the horrors Babe had seen.

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While Judge Meron noted that the events of the Holocaust may seem far away for many, separated by "decades of progress", he stressed that "for those of us who lived through them, as I did as a boy in occupied Poland, they are all too real".

"What followed was the ghettos, work camps and most of my family falling victim to the Holocaust," he said.

The keynote speaker at the UN's ceremony in New York, pointed out that while one-third of the Jewish people were murdered in the Holocaust, "it is often forgotten how millions of Russians and Poles also fell victim to the Nazi killing machine".

Today, he said, we remember those whom we lost so many years ago, but we also "honour those who took invaluable steps to prevent even greater losses."

Even while describing "those apocalyptic times", Judge Meron spoke eloquently of the many who risked their lives to protect Jews, and he paid tribute to "those who were saved, and those who took courageous action to save their neighbours from certain death".

"That we pause to reflect upon the Holocaust and remember those lost is vitally important," he said. "That we learn from all that has taken place is imperative, and it is all the more vital that we take every opportunity...to learn from the general that survived, from those who lived through the chaos and calamities of those years".

Too many were lost, "and soon we too will be gone", he continued, "leaving those of you gathered here to carry our stories forward in the future, [especially] that most essential lesson: Never again".

Hitler did not win

"I stand today in front of you to tell you, Hitler did not win", Holocaust survivor Irene Shashar told those assembled. "I remember."

Ms. Shashar was born in Poland in 1937 and was not quite two-years old when the Nazis invaded. By the time she turned two, she would be starving in the Warsaw Ghetto.

As she and her family were forcibly moved into the ghetto, Ms. Shashar noted that "the seeds of genocide had been planted" and "survival was the only thing that mattered".

While she'd hoped "someone would say it was all a big mistake", of course, that was not the case. "The move to the ghetto was only the beginning of our suffering."

Ms. Shashar recalled one afternoon as she and her mother were out searching for food in the streets, they'd heard "bloodcurdling screams".

"Mother yanked my little arm and took off in the direction of our cramped living quarters we knew of as 'home'", she said.

They'd dashed up the stairway, to their open door where, "lying in the kitchen was my father... limp, bleeding from a gash on the side of his throat".

"My mother threw herself on top of him. She let out a wail that could have be heard on the other side of the planet", she continued, "that was the last time I ever saw my father".

One day as they hunted for scraps of food, she was "tossed down a sewer".

"It was wet, dirty...we were crossing the sewer for the whole ghetto area," she recalled. "All these years later, I can still smell the stench of that seemingly endless passage [as] rats skittered past me".

This was how they escaped to the so-called Aryan side of Warsaw.

A hidden child

For the remainder of the war, Ms. Shashar remained hidden.

Her mother would say, "If you don't cry and are a good girl, this will be over soon", she remembered.

Both survived the Holocaust, but her mother died in 1948, leaving her a 10-year-old orphan in the care of a family in Peru. There she was able to start a new life.

Ms. Shashar credited her mother's "overwhelming sacrifice, a priceless, selfless act of courage", that gave her the chance to survive and to thrive in adulthood.

"Thanks to her, I was blessed with the opportunity to have children and grandchildren," she said. "Because I sowed my family tree, Hitler did not win. I did the very thing he tried so hard to prevent".

"I was victorious over Hitler", Ms. Shashar concluded with a plea that the UN, which rose from the ashes of WWII, raise its voice, "because silence is indifference".

Living in 'constant fear'

Shraga Milstein was only six years old when the war broke out.

"The switch from a free and comfortable life to being closed up in a room at the age of six with the constant fear of what the next hour will bring" was Mr. Milstein earliest memory of the Holocaust.

He recalled that in the ghetto his parents tried to prevent him from seeing blood or dead bodies in the street, "which were a common sight".

Mr. Milstein told how one day everyone was assembled in an open square to walk past a ranking SS Officer, who divided them into two groups.

One group was told to walk under guard to the railway station and the other to return home.

"I still do not understand why and how my father, mother, brother and I were not separated and ordered to return home", he stated, adding that other family members "were not so lucky".

Those that remained in the ghetto were sent to labour camps. At age 11, he worked eight to ten hours a day as an apprentice wood cutter.

And in 1944, was shipped by cattle car with his father and brother to Buchenwald while his mother was sent to Ravensbrück, "it was the last time I saw her", Mr. Milstein lamented.

Upon their arrival, Mr. Milstein's father hugged them to say goodbye and reminded the boys that they had family in Palestine. His father was killed the next day at the age of 43.

Several weeks later, Mr. Milstein was transferred with others to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where "there were no executions, but people died there from severe hunger" and cold, he explained.

From 1943 until liberation, some 140,000 men, women and children were imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen where about 50,000 died after "prolonged suffering," he said.

'Site of hell'

He painted a disturbing picture of the state of the camp when the soldiers arrived to liberate the prisoners, calling it a "site of hell [with] piles of corpses" scattered everywhere and in the barracks, "living people were lying next to dead corpses" without hygiene or water.

The camp was liberated by British soldiers on 15 April 1945 and took them from the squalor of the concentration camp" to proper housing with a clean bed in a military facility.

That day "my world changed from complete neglect and apathy to human compassion and a true effort to help the scared, hungry and sick", he said.

"The Bergen-Belsen camp was burned and in it, are today mass graves," a memorial site and museum that keeps "the memory of the atrocities alive" and presents visitors "a world of human understanding, tolerance, freedom and democracy based on the equality of every human being".

"It is our duty to condemn and prevent any intolerance against people based on ethnic origin or religion", he concluded.

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'Carry our stories forward': Holocaust survivors share powerful testimonies at UN

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When the Nazis invaded Poland, overnight, nine-year-old Theodor Meron became "a refugee, out of school, out of childhood and constantly in clear and present danger", the man who would later become a Judge for International Criminal Tribunals told the United Nations Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony on Monday.

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Irene Fogel Weiss, born in 1930 in Bótrágy, Czechoslovakia, now Batrad, Ukraine. She lives in Virginia, US. She will be returning to Auschwitz for the third time, as part of the US presidential delegation, along with her daughter, Lesley Weiss

We lived in Bótrágy, a very small, mostly poor town in Czechoslovakia with a population of approximately 1,000 mainly farming families, including about 10 Jewish families. The town was a typical low-income community with a tailor, a shoemaker, a grocery store, where people struggled to get by, but where everyone knew each other and there was easy communication between the neighbours, though that didn't mean we were equal.

When I was eight years old Czechoslovakia broke apart and we became part of Hungary. That was when our problems started, because the Hungarians were allied with the Nazis. It was a difficult time for Jewish families, as suddenly the law no longer protected us and overnight we lost our civil rights. My father's lumber business was confiscated and given to a non-Jew, and we received no compensation. Jewish children were thrown out of Hungarian schools, so right away we had no choice but to concentrate on hunkering down and trying not to bring attention to ourselves. We couldn't ride the trains and we had to wear the yellow star. It was a free for all. With no law to protect us, it was common for Jews to get beaten up or thrown off the train.

It's an incredibly scary feeling when you're exposed to anyone's raw feelings and enmity. These young Nazis habitually roamed around and did tremendous damage to many individuals. But at least we were still in our community and were not evicted from our home, so that was some comfort.

We didn't have radio or much access to newspapers, so all the children were reliant on listening to their parents for information. But I remember many things about the course of the war, who was winning and losing, and the repression of Jews elsewhere.

Hungary didn't give up its Jewish population until it was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1944. The very first task the German government gave the Hungarians was to round up Jewish families and deport them to Auschwitz. There was a huge rush to take half a million Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz and it was completed in just six weeks, in 147 cattle cars. So in the spring of 1944 my family - my parents and their six children, the oldest of whom was 17 and I was 13 - found ourselves in the Munkács ghetto and from there being taken on cattle carts to Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Imagine it like this: three generations of your family have lived in the same house in the same town. They've struggled to raise a family, put kids through school, to feed them all. You have your friends and family. All of a sudden you are told to leave it all and walk out with a single suitcase.

I remember the night of the packing very well. Things went in the suitcase, things were taken out of the suitcase. In the end my mother filled it with food she had cooked and warm clothing and bedding. Then it was full. Plus we took a watch, some earrings, a wedding ring with us to exchange for food if necessary. The next day my father was forced to hand over his remaining money to a delegation that included the mayor and the school principal as they rounded us up at the town hall.

We had been absolutely unaware of such a place as Auschwitz. It was a stunning reversal of the life we had had up until then. And I cannot emphasise enough how utterly scary it is to be at the mercy of your fellow human beings. As a child I could not understand what we had done to deserve going there.

My father surveyed the scene from the train and could see prisoners, uniforms and barracks so we immediately thought it was a work camp, and that was reassuring - if we can work, it can't be such a dreadful place. We had heard about the stories in Poland of lots of mass shootings of Jews or people being taken into the forest and shot, so it was a relief to see out the window that there was actually a system. Even though we were victims of discrimination at that stage that's all it was, as we had no clue then that this was a very carefully orchestrated plan of genocide. We could not have imagined that they would kill little children, until we realised that killing children was their primary goal to prevent any new generations. Because desperate people will always look to find some sign of hope, we thought to ourselves even if we have to work, at least we'll see each other occasionally.

But the German system was full of this sort of deception. It counted on people's normal perception of things. Thinking we were going to a work camp. Thinking that you were going to take a shower when in fact you were going to the gas chambers - that was the ultimate deceit.

When we arrived it was, as I later found out, the usual story, though not to us at the time. Our family was torn apart on the platform on arriving. My sister, Serena, was chosen for slave labour. My mother and the younger children were sent off to one side and my father and 16-year-old brother to the other side. I held tightly on to the hand of my 12-year-old sister and for an instant I was mistaken for being older than I was, probably because I was wearing a headscarf that my mother had given me.

My sister was sent with my mother, while I went to the opposite side. That was the first chance I had to survive. Unbeknown to any of us at the time, two Nazi soldiers had been asked to make a photographic document of the deportation of Hungarian Jews from the moment they got off the train - through the entire system of arriving, going to the bath house and getting their prison clothes - so I ended up in a picture at the very moment I was separated from my sister. It captures me standing alone without my family on the Auschwitz platform, and I'm leaning inwards to see where my little sister has gone.

Another picture we discovered shows my family waiting in line for the gas chamber. Two little boys, my brothers Reuven and Gershon, are shown dressed in hats, one struggling to put on his winter coat. For a long time I failed to find my mother and was very unhappy. But I spent hours looking at these photos with a magnifying glass and one day I found her little face sticking out.

The pictures only came to light 25 years ago and, despite them showing moments from around 45 years before that, they completely captured the entire experience as it had been in my mind all that time. I was dumbfounded and devastated, having had no idea they existed, and I have spent literally hundreds of hours scouring them, trying to find my father and brother. The pictures have reassured me that I was not imagining it all, as I sometimes thought I might have done.

The reality of where we were, struck home fairly quickly. I was stationed near crematorium number four, and we witnessed the columns of unsuspecting women and children entering the gate of the crematorium; they would have been dead within half an hour. When the Hungarian Jews arrived they had the gas chambers going day and night. How can you wrap your imagination round that? I still can't.

I was with my older sister Serena and we were sent to be forced labourers together in the Birkenau section of Auschwitz. Many times we were threatened with separation but somehow we managed to stay together. Later on, to our great relief we ran into my mother's two younger sisters, our aunts Rose and Piri, who were in their early 20s. It was like finding our parents. They were such a huge moral and emotional support for us.

On about 17 January or 18 January 1945, the SS dragged thousands of us out of the camp to walk to Ravensbrück concentration camp deep into central Germany. I don't really know why. We were in terrible straits with no proper clothes, nothing suitable for marching through the snow. It was as if the cruelty would never end. If anyone sat down out of exhaustion, they were shot. Later we were transported yet again, and my aunt Piri became ill and was killed.

As the Soviets approached, the SS left and I, Serena and Rose took shelter in an empty house nearby. The Russians came but for some reason left again immediately, so we were left to fend for ourselves.

We spent months trying to get to Prague where we knew we had some relatives and from there we went to the Sudetenland. I got to go to school, my sister found work in a factory and Rose was sick at home with tuberculosis.

We initially had no idea what had happened to the rest of the family and had no access to a phone. But on buildings everywhere lists were put up stating who was still alive. Everyone you met you asked, every meeting of refugees was dominated by trying to find out where your relatives were.

Eventually I discovered that of around 100 people from my town who were deported, only about 10 survived, only two of whom were children - my sister and me. But there was not one parent and child who lived. All of them were killed.

Serena now lives in New Jersey with her family, including three children and grandchildren. We've both managed to hang on in there, but she can't come to Auschwitz because her elderly husband is sick. For years when we talked about our experience she'd say to me: "You probably don't remember, you were too young," as I was four years younger, but some things I remembered even more sharply than her and my aunt.

I'm often asked how I have coped. I never went to a psychologist and I never will. Quite simply, I kept it at a distance. I saw and understood, and yet I didn't. I've never cried over the columns of children and mothers I saw. When I was in Auschwitz I thought: 'This is not actually on earth.' It was a system of masters and slaves, gods and subhumans and I thought to myself: 'No one knows about it. It's the forest, surrounded by multiple layers of fence, it's not actually real.' I never let it penetrate that my parents were killed and I even thought: 'After this we're going home and everyone will be there again.' Those who never managed to keep it distant killed themselves.

I threw myself into family life. I married young, I had three children, (I now also have four grandchildren) and then I went to college and became a teacher. You fall into a routine and do the best you can. But I've never lost the feeling of how unreliable human beings are and neither am I fooled by superficial civilisation. But I realise that loss of faith in people is more devastating than loss of faith in God.

I won't be going back to Auschwitz again after this visit. So it's my last chance to make sure this tragedy is not forgotten. I found out only about a week before I was due to leave that I will be one of two survivors who will be part of the US presidential delegation, headed by the secretary of the treasury, Jack Lew, and I feel very honoured, but it has much to do with the fact that many others who could go are ill and unable to travel.

Joseph Mandrowitz, born in Czemierniki, Poland in 1923. He now lives in Toms River, New Jersey, and is returning to Auschwitz for the second time with his second cousin

We had a quiet life until the day they took 1,000 Jews away from my village of Czemierniki, a typical Polish village with a big square around which community life took place. My father was a bootmaker, my mother was a seamstress and everyone worked hard. There was always some antisemitism, but it was mainly fairly harmless, consisting of kids at our school who during religious education taunted the five or six Jewish kids in the class with "Jews killed Jesus."

I had trained as a tailor and had left home before we were deported, when I went to work four miles away on a ranch. It was taken over by the SS, so suddenly I found myself working for them. In May 1943 they lined us up one day and told us to empty our pockets. If they found even a single zloty in anyone's pocket, they were shot on the spot. We were transported to Majdanek, which was only 19 miles away - a torture camp in the true sense of the word. For 500 metres there were just ditches full of bodies, legs, heads. We were deported to Auschwitz four weeks later. We arrived in the early morning and they gave us a bed, a real shower, they cleaned us well with disinfectant and shaved us. After that they gave us striped uniforms and tattooed us. I was given the number 128164 on my left arm and from that point on I was a number, no longer a name.

From there we were sent to Buna (an Auschwitz sub camp) and were set to work. After a few months there, I went for a walk one day and saw a few tomatoes growing. I was starving by then so tried to take them and was given a beating so severe, I don't know how I survived it. I still have the scars from it today. I was taken to hospital and knew the rule: if you didn't heal in four to five days, they'd take you to Birkenau and you'd be gassed.

I was 20, about 1.7 metres (5ft 7in) tall, blond, not bad looking and, despite the beating, in pretty good shape. When my limit in the hospital was up, they sent me to the gas chambers. There I met Dr Mengele, who asked me what was wrong. I said: "You can see, I've been beaten up." Instead of sending me to the gas chambers, I was sent back to the hospital, presumably he saw the potential for labour in me. As I had trained as a tailor, he decided I had my uses there. The soldiers wanted to look nice, so they'd come to me in the hospital if they wanted their uniforms fixed up. The very fact that my new job meant I didn't have to get up in the morning in the harsh winter in thin clothes standing around for hours for the headcount was a big thing. It meant that being a tailor saved my life.

That Mengele - they call him a doctor, but he was as much a doctor as I'm an army general. A complete fake of a man who I was too scared to look in the eye. I saw him day in, day out for months and was one of 152 Jews in his "care". One of the experiments he carried out on me was to take blood from my arm and inject it in my rear end. I've no idea what that was trying to prove.

For some astonishing reason he "saved" me a second time, after the decision was made to clear the hospital and 150 people were sent to the gas chambers except for me and a boy from Saloniki. That's not to say I liked him at all - he was a hateful man, who hated himself first and foremost and then everyone else around him.

In 1944 we were sent on a death march from Birkenau to Oranienburg and from there to Buchenwald. Then to a quarry, where we were ordered to drill into the mountains to make some sort of secret city. From there we walked back to Buchenwald. Whoever was incapable of walking was shot. From there, big trains took us to Theresienstadt just as the Soviets were bombing the rails. We could sense that the Germans were almost destroyed. For 17 days we had no water, no food, nothing. Despite the hardship I was doing OK compared to others. I still had the capability to clamber on to the cattle trains without help.

We were liberated from the Russians at Theresienstadt on 9 May. I developed typhus and spent several weeks in hospital before I could go anywhere.

I decided to go back to my village as I had nowhere else to go. But of the 1,000 or so of us who had been deported, only eight to 10 had survived. Some people had warned me not to go back, saying there had been attacks on those who had returned, including the Jewish woman I had worked for when I'd done my tailor apprenticeship. She'd gone back to reclaim some possessions she had left behind in somebody's house and they killed her rather than return the items. She and her husband had been the only couple in Czemierniki to survive and then they went and murdered her when she came home.

I had had parents, two brothers, three sisters, two nephews, two nieces, an aunt, an uncle, and all of them died. I found out the rest of my family were taken to Treblinka in 1942.

When I finally returned to Czemierniki in 1993, despite the years in which Jews had lived there I could not find a trace either of my family or of Jewish life. Even the cemetery where my grandfather had been buried had been razed. The synagogue was gone. I went to ask the local priest, who said they had taken the tombstones and crushed them for building materials or something like that. I believe they deliberately destroyed any sign of Jewish life so as to be rid of us for ever.

The Jewish Federation brought me to America. I deliberately chose against going to Israel as it would have meant I would have had to fight and kill and the US seemed the next best choice. They put me up in a hotel on 35th and 36th street until I got myself sorted out. I was desperate to get to work and make up for all those wasted years.

I started looking for work as soon as I arrived, finding a job earning $35 (£23) a week and by 1955 I had opened up my own business in Brooklyn, Queens, as a tailor and I think I did OK. I worked for some dignitaries, including Henry Kissinger and Nancy Reagan, and I also did a lot for the Johnsons. I'd be putting together the garments designed for them by the likes of Oscar de la Renta and Geoffrey Beene.

The US gave me a pretty good life. In fact I'd say I found my heaven here.

Of the 1,000 Jews taken from my village, only three of us are still alive, one living in Israel, one in Baltimore and myself. We stay in touch.

I still drive my car, though not at night any more. I get jumpy when someone honks their horn, and occasionally I have bad dreams and wake up at night, my wife asking me: "What's up?", and I tell her I'm being chased by Germans. But that's the story of my life. I still can't believe it happened. When I sit down and watch programmes on the Holocaust on the History Channel it's as if I'm watching some made-up horror film.

I have to go back to Auschwitz one last time. I feel like I own the place, having spent almost two years of my life there. I never forget it and I don't want to forget it because it's effectively the story of my life."

Eva Umlauf, born in December 1942 at a labour camp in Nowaky, Czechoslovakia, in what is now Slovakia. She now lives in Munich, Germany, and works as a psychotherapist. She is returning to Auschwitz for the third time. Her book on the Holocaust is due to be published in 2016

I was not even two when we arrived at Auschwitz in 1944. I have no conscious memories of that time, but plenty of subconscious ones. My mother told me later how when they tattooed my arm with a needle, it was so painful that I passed out. The number they gave me and that I still have was A26959. My mother's ended in 8. I was probably the youngest child to have been tattooed who survived.

My mother was four months pregnant when we arrived. My sister Nora was born there in April 1945.

Had we arrived just two days earlier, we would have been gassed immediately. Our transport was the first from which no one was taken to the gas chambers, probably because they knew by then that the Russians were very close. We arrived on 2 November and on 30 October, 18,000 mothers and children who had arrived from Theresienstadt were killed.

On the two occasions I have returned to Auschwitz, in 1995 and 2011, although I haven't got memories as such of the time I spent there, something is triggered deep inside me, both physically and in my inner being. I get very nervous and the death, the cold, the expanse and the emptiness of it swamps me - it's a feeling that it's hard to explain but it's everywhere. I can feel the burnt earth everywhere I walk.

When Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, we were already extremely sick, so we had to stay there. A Jewish paediatrician from Prague said my mother and her baby would not survive. She had rickets, TB and jaundice. But in April, against the odds, my mother gave birth to my sister, helped by prisoners who were doctors.

My mother never talked very much about our time there, mainly to protect us and herself. She was 21 when we were finally able to leave, with a two-year-old and a six-week-old. She also took with us a four-year-old boy who was parentless and she spent months searching for his relatives, who she did finally track down. At the same time, she had lost her husband and was mourning him. There was an unspoken ban on speaking about any of it. We went back to live in Trenčín, the small town in Slovakia where my mother had moved when she married my father, and where the Red Cross found us a room.

There was a frantic search to see who had survived and to look for relatives. But none of our relatives were still alive. My grandmother, great-grandmother and great-grandfather, my mother's three siblings - all had died.

Probably my earliest memories of anything at all are of walking through the streets of Trenčín and people stopping in their tracks and saying with amazement: "You're back!" "What a miracle that you're alive!" I understood as a three-and-a-half to four-year-old that I was a miracle because I got to hear it so many times, but I didn't really understand what the word meant. Only much later could I recognise what a miracle it really was that I had survived, when I learned that of the thousands of Slovak men and women who were deported to Auschwitz, only a few hundred returned.

My mother put every effort into giving us a normal life. She sent us to school and made sure we studied. She was loving and resourceful. It was only later when she got old that she was gripped by depression. Having held everything together and been so capable and diligent for so long, she just fell apart as if under the burden of it all, and she died at the age of 72. It's no accident that I and my sister became doctors - we had an absolute primal need to help people and save lives.

I later qualified as a psychotherapist, a job which I enjoy immensely, but which confronts me with the suffering caused by the Holocaust on a daily basis. My patients are from "both sides" - either victims or perpetrators, or their relatives - and many are what you'd call transgenerationally affected - carrying around with them the issues and traumas that their parents or grandparents never dealt with, and which unless cured are like a contagious disease that they'll pass on to the next generation.

I married a Polish Jew and we settled in Germany, the "Täterland" - the land of the perpetrator - after being forced out of Czechoslovakia after the collapse of the Prague Spring in 1968. It does sometimes feel like a strange decision to live in Germany because the Holocaust is just so omnipresent here and there is a growing antisemitism that scares me, especially when you feel it in Germany, of all places, which is why I always repeat what Primo Levi wrote: "What happened can happen again."

That's why I go into schools and talk to 15 year olds in and around Munich because we have to repeatedly confront it. That's why I'm returning to Auschwitz on Monday. It will be the last time many people return, the end of an epoch. The wounds might heal, but they leave scars which are still very visible.

Susan Pollack, born Zsuzsanna Blau in Felsogod, Hungary in 1930. She now lives in London. She is returning to Auschwitz for the first time, with her grandson Anthony, 33

From the moment I arrived in Auschwitz with my mother and brother in May 1944, the terror of it just invaded my whole being. My mother was immediately taken away and I later learned that she had been gassed. I only recently discovered that my father had been there too.

My whole world was turned upside down by the brutality of it. We had not in any way understood what had been going on, only later recognising all the sources and streams that led to the Holocaust. In my small Hungarian village, information had been very restricted. We didn't know about anything, like the Wannsee conference (where the Final Solution was planned), and neither could we have imagined it. We were told by the authorities that we were being resettled, which is why I took my sewing machine with me. I took my sewing machine!

The process of losing any kind of hope was a very gradual one. We were transported in cattle wagons in which many babies and children suffocated, in what it turned out was the last transport of Hungarians. We had no water, no food, there was no hygiene. That diminished our hope and increased the feeling of being trapped. But despite that, you always retained a glimmer of hope. Always.

I had become aware of antisemitism from a young age, when my uncle had his head chopped in two when he was attacked by fascists while driving up to Novograd where he lived. While his attacker was convicted, he was hardly punished, and continued to live opposite my uncle's wife and child. But as a child you don't think about these things all that much. My family had a wood and coal business and, like most people in those days, my father was self-employed. As they started to restrict us, he lost his licence to operate and then he faced the enormous task of trying to find work. Meanwhile, my mother was at home trying to keep the family together, with all of us all involved in domestic life.

I recall the time in Auschwitz as single moments, short encounters, smells. We tried to distract ourselves from the reality of it by trying to recall our home lives in what turned into a game of momentary escapism. Quietly, the children would huddle together and ask each other: "What will you have for breakfast?" And I remember saying: "Maybe an egg or a piece of bread and butter," and tried to conjure up memories of home.

I vaguely recall the death march to Bergen-Belsen. I was so weak by then. The conditions were appalling and they'd put us in a barracks. I remember crawling out of it - because by that time I was too weak to walk, but I couldn't bear to stay among the corpses any longer - and bumping into a neighbour who was as surprised to see me as I was her.

Our British liberators were amazing - they were heroes for me in the real sense of the word. After their long battle to reach Belsen, they had a campaign to organise a rescue mission. To this day I'm aghast that they were so saintly. They brought little ambulances in and drove around picking us up. I was trembling and virtually lifeless, lying near the barracks, the stench of corpses everywhere, and unable to walk or lift myself up, when they arrived with a little ambulance. I don't think I was able to talk to the soldier who approached me, my comprehension had long gone, but I remember the gentleness in him. We couldn't eat and I remember fainting when I tried to get out of bed. Gradually they administered the food, but I didn't trust anyone and I hid the food in my bed, afraid that they would suddenly take it away. Even now I feel that sense at every meal time of how lucky I am, and I often say to those at the table: "Isn't this wonderful?" and " Aren't we lucky?"

After our liberation I went to Sweden where we were looked after marvellously. The physical recovery was not as bad as the emotional and mental one, which I'm still working on. I am still touched by the memory of a doctor who taught me how to walk again, as through the malnutrition I was incapable. Such a simple thing, but he told me: "I have a daughter like you," and how vital that statement of his was to my sense of becoming a human being again. It was amazing to be compared to someone having felt completely dehumanised for so long.

After what happened, and having lost 50 members of my family, it was very important for me to have my own little family, to have again that sense of belonging. I really wanted to have children and was just 18 when I got married to a fellow Holocaust survivor from Transylvania. But I've always been careful not to tell my children too much about what I went through so as not to traumatise them. They're entitled to a carefree youth, I always thought, and I didn't want to be spreading bitterness and hate.

I have had a good life. I was a Samaritan and I've been going to schools and talking to 15-year-olds for the past 20 years. I try to tell them how small streams of hatred can quickly lead to unstoppable, horrific things, so they should stand up to any type of persecution or discrimination, whether bullying or malicious gossip.

I did go back to my village, in 1995. But there was never any sense of any culpability and it seemed a futile exercise for me to try to find out who had betrayed us.

Returning to Auschwitz is going to be a cold, painful and tearful experience. It is a shadow that has always been with me and I'm hoping that by facing it for one last time at the age of 84 I will be able to live my life more peacefully, but I am extremely anxious. I lost my husband just days ago and I'm hoping I'll finally be able to release my emotions when I'm there, as I've never really been able to cry much about anything. I'm comforted by the thought that there will be strength in numbers and that I'll be there with perhaps 100 or so other survivors, which makes it easier. I would not go on my own. I appear to be a strong person, but inside I'm really quite fragile.

Mordechai Ronen, born in Dej, Transylvania, in what is now Romania, in 1933. He now lives in Toronto with his wife, Ilana. He is returning to Auschwitz for the third time. His autobiography is due to be published in September

We lived in a white-painted brick house on Kodur Street in Dej, which had a population of about 15,000, around a quarter of whom were Jewish. I was the youngest of five, and we spoke Yiddish within the community and Hungarian and Romanian outside. We had a garden and backyard, full of plums, peaches, cherries and apples. Among the smells of my childhood were my mother's goulash and the scent of Shabbat candles. My father was a merchant, a travelling salesman. My mother had the full-time job of keeping the house and family. I remember the lullaby she used to sing me, Schaefeleh, schluf mein tier kind (Sleep well, my precious little child). The synagogue or shul was the centre of communal life, and the centre of my life from three years upwards. I don't remember any overt antisemitism, just my parents warning me to be inside before dark: "Lest some Christian kids decide they don't like the look of your sidelocks and pick on you." I just thought my parents were being overprotective.

We had no daily paper, no radio or phone, so the only news we got of the second world war was from newcomers to town. The change started at the end of 1942-43, when people began expressing their anger towards us, especially the Hungarian neighbours. We'd hear: "Zsidók, menjetek ki, Gyerünk haza!" ("Jews, get out of here, Go home!") I was in the synagogue singing when a rock shattered the stained-glass window. The rabbi tried to convince us it was just some drunk, but as a 10-year-old, I knew better.

One day, four or five men came to our synagogue. They had escaped from Poland and came with stories we found impossible to believe - of Nazis rounding up Jews, looting their possessions, murdering them. People said the men were meshuggah (crazy).

The only impact these stories had on my family was the cache of extra potatoes and bread that I discovered stashed away in our basement. But by 1943, we started getting clearer signs.

My father's beard was shaved by some locals, who grabbed him. I stopped going to school. My parents gave me a lantern to carry with me after dark. Then I wasn't allowed out at all.

One day the Hungarian gendarmes came to our house and ransacked it. In 1944, the Nazis ordered all Jews living outside Budapest to be rounded up and placed in ghettoes. Then it was our turn and that was the day our misery truly began. In the spring of 1944 we were part of a contingent of 7,500 Jews who were corralled into a makeshift ghetto in the Bungur forest. We had to wear the yellow stars of David. That was the day when almost one-and-a-half centuries of Jewish life in Dej came to an end.

In our forest ghetto I remember a local man, Mihai, who brought his cow to help us out with milk, having heard we were starving. He was arrested and beaten to a pulp and remained a paraplegic for the rest of his life. Two weeks into our ghetto life, we were sent to Auschwitz, 435 miles north-west of Dej.

At this point my family was still together. They told the women and children to go to the left, and that's what my mother and two sisters did. My father and I were inspected by [Josef] Mengele, who was holding a baton, and went to the right. It was the last time I saw my mother and sisters alive.

Other Jews responsible for telling us the rules approached us and said: "Farvos inem gehenem zayn' du kumen aher?" ("Why the hell did you come here?") "Didn't you hear the warnings?"

I saw some soldiers toss a baby up and shoot it in mid air for fun and from then on I had no doubt about what awaited us here.

I worked out pretty quickly certain survival tricks. That if the guards called us to line up in front of the barracks, I should hide or sneak into another barracks. The safest place I could find to hide was in the yard near the bathrooms where all the dead bodies were brought and piled up ... I would get on the pile, lie down next to the dead bodies and pretend I was one of them.

They gave us food in barrels. When the barrel was empty, I could get inside and scrape the leftovers from the bottom. In that way my dad and I got extra food.

I remember the chimneys with dark, thick smoke rising from them; dogs barking all the time. From Auschwitz, they moved us to Birkenau, then to Mauthausen-Gusen. Every morning there were dead bodies along the barbed wire fences around the camp. The electrified fences instantly killed anyone who touched them. Perhaps these were simply acts of suicide.

When we were in Gusen penal camp, my father, who was 50, one day just gave up and said he couldn't continue. From that moment I was totally alone. In February 1945 they moved us to Gunskirchen, Upper Austria. It was here that I witnessed starving people eating human flesh. We were liberated by Americans and Canadians in Gunskirchen. The Germans had simply left the camp, and with an absence of drama we just walked through the gates. The first thing I did was to knock on a local resident's door and ask for permission to take a shower. Somehow, I managed to meet up with my brothers, David and Shuli. We had no desire to return to Dej, to the people who had betrayed us.

I wanted to go to Israel, as that had been my father's dream, but it wasn't easy to get there. There was no independent Jewish state then and it was run by the British, who wanted to limit immigration.

In Italy I joined the Irgun, the Zionist underground organisation fighting for Israeli independence led by Menachem Begin (later prime minister of Israel), and travelled with an arms smuggling ship, the Altalena, to Tel Aviv. All the time I kept with me my prison uniform, as proof of what had happened to me. We arrived on the shores of Tel Aviv on 20 June 1948 and I found myself at a pivotal moment in Israeli history, in a boat full of weapons that Ben-Gurion would not let on shore. It could easily have turned into a civil war. I was shot at by Israel Defence Force troopers as I jumped into the water and the Altalena was set ablaze and sunk by the IDF. With it sank my suitcase of clothes and my striped prisoner uniform, including my hat, coat, shirt and a knife.

Henry Korman, 94, born in Radom, Poland. He now lives in Hanover, north Germany. He will be returning to Auschwitz for the first time, with the 17-year-old son of his nephew, Ethan.

"I had just finished high school in 1939 and had had all sorts of plans for my future. My family ran a hat factory, making hats for every occasion and purpose. But as the authorities began clamping down and the antisemitism grew, much of it fuelled by the Catholic church, gradually everything was confiscated - our house then the business.

We tried to get out - we'd seen the signs of what was to come, not that we could really have known the full extent of what would happen. My uncle had worked in Palestine in 1917 but had been forced to return to Poland when he got sick. We tried to use the contacts he still had there to escape, but the British (who were in control of it) wouldn't give us permission to go there. In my mind they carry a lot of the blame for the deaths of many of the Jews - especially the Polish Jews - who perished.

We were sent to the Radom ghetto, where I spent the first years of the war working for the Jewish committee. But when they started taking the ghetto leaders to Auschwitz, I quickly changed jobs and began working in a munitions factory instead, hoping that if I kept my head down, I might be OK. But after moving from one factory to another, I too was deported to Auschwitz when the ghetto was liquidated in 1942. I was separated from my parents and three sisters, all of whom were taken to Treblinka.

On our arrival at Auschwitz they chased us off the cattle wagon, which stopped right in front of the gate with the sign Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes You Free). I thought I was entering a labour camp, but little did I know. They asked me my profession, and I said painter as I'd picked up the advice en route to say something practical and useful. If I'd said I'd just finished high school they'd have sent me straight to the gas chambers.

One of the first people I encountered was Mengele. He told us to undress and stand in line and he went through the ranks deciding who was strong and healthy and fit for work, and who was only fit for the gas chamber. After inspecting me, he put his thumb up high, so they gave me the striped uniform and sent me to get a number tattooed on to my arm. I don't remember the number. It's there still, but I never look at it because it brings back too many painful memories.

After Auschwitz they transferred me to Mauthausen, then Gozen and Hanover. From there they sent us on foot to Bergen-Belsen, where I was finally liberated. It was 14 April (1945). I was so weak I could hardly stand and it was all I could do to lift my head slightly from the ground where I was lying as British army tanks started arriving to save us. But for all the great things the British did then, I can only say they made many other mistakes and what's going on in Israel now is largely Britain's fault.

I also resent the Americans for knowing what was going on but doing nothing about it until 1944. As soon as Hitler wrote Mein Kampf they should have known what was going on.

So I ended up in Sweden where I learned that my sister had also been in Belsen. In Stockholm I studied chemistry and it was there I found out, having lost all my family in Europe, that I had relatives in America, an aunt - my father's sister - who had emigrated in the 1920s, so I went to live with them.

I've never sought any counselling or professional help - I never thought it would help. My therapy has been to go and talk to schoolchildren about my experiences. My advice to them is to respect their teachers and have a clear plan for the future.

I did go back to my home town, Radom, just once in 1996 or 1998. I saw our house, and stood in the backyard, but my heart was bleeding so much, I didn't dare go in. I walked up the street and it was like walking on history - something lost and far away, but also very close. Here was the road on which I used to run to school, to the factory, but I had to get away very quickly. I was thinking: "I'm here, but where are all of them, my family?"

I now live in Hanover, Germany, which doesn't feel strange to me to be living in the land of the murderers, because it's a different country now. At least people listen to my story here. When I travel to the US nobody asks me, so I never say anything. But I have a hunch that as soon as his feet touch the ground in Auschwitz, my nephew's son will start to ask questions.

I never dared to start my own family or have children of my own. I was just too afraid of making those close bonds.

When your relatives die, there's usually a place you can go to pay your respects, like a cemetery with a grave where you can lay a stone and talk to them. The only place I have is Auschwitz and going back there for the first time will be the first and last chance I have to be able to return to the people I loved who I lost there and in other concentration camps.

My family are always with me. I carry pictures of them in my pocket the entire time, wherever I go, even when I go to sleep they are with me. To this day I still don't know the circumstances of their deaths or even where they died.

Auschwitz has been in my head all these years. I just need to close my eyes and instantly the pictures of the horror come back to me. I worry what will happen when I and others like me are no longer here to tell the story. I want people to keep reading about it and for them to leave tears on the paper.

Forgive or forget: survivors of genocide in the Holocaust, Rwanda and Cambodia describe their experiences Guardian

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Tuesday 27 January is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Six survivors, some of whom will be returning to the site for the last time, tell Kate Connolly their stories

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Together with a staff of around 35 people, Goldberger had worked to prepare a temporary reception centre near Windermere for the children. They had repurposed a set of barracks built during the war for aircraft factory workers, and had scrubbed and rescrubbed the dormitories. The beds had crisp white sheets. Little bowls of sweets had been placed on the nightstands. The staff wanted the children to feel welcome, but none knew quite what to expect of these children who had been found in or near the liberated ghetto-camp of Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia.

They knew little about what had gone on in Adolf Hitler's concentration camps, but had all seen shocking photos in newspapers and footage in newsreels of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald in April 1945: the corpses of the dead, and the starved and broken bodies of the living, peering out of skull-like faces, witnesses to conditions so horrific they stretched the human imagination. The children due to arrive that afternoon had seen the inside of the concentration camps. How would they behave? What would they need? Would the staff at Windermere be able to help them at all?

An estimated 90% of Europe's Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust

Expecting the children to be very young, Goldberger and her staff went around placing dolls and teddy bears on the beds. Then they waited for the planes. The hours crept by. The first plane arrived at around 4pm. The assembled crowd pressed forwards: staff, journalists from the local papers, customs officials and a welcoming party from the local Women's Voluntary Service. But to the surprise of those waiting, the children who stepped off the plane were teenagers. Plane after plane arrived, but there were no young children among the passengers. "We began to worry after so many planes of youths arrived that there would be no small children," Goldberger later wrote. "I thought about the dolls and bears in each of the beds, and what a joke that would be to these adolescents when they went to their beds." Finally, long after dark, the last two planes arrived, and among the passengers were nine children between the ages of four and ten, and six three-year-old toddlers.

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The youngest survivors

An estimated 90 per cent of Europe's Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust. The roughly 150,000 children under the age of 18 who survived had seen periods in hiding, in ghettoes, and in forced labour and concentration camps, and many found that they were orphans at the war's end. Postwar efforts to help these children - alongside the estimated 13 million other European children who lost parents in the war - constituted one of the largest humanitarian aid projects in history.

At the liberation, children were found in many concentration camps, but most were older children who had been admitted to the camps to work as slave labourers. For the teenagers who arrived at Crosby-on-Eden on that day in August 1945, Theresienstadt had been but a brief final destination after two-year or three-year sagas that had taken them through many different concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Buchenwald. They had been sent westwards on death marches as Allied forces approached, for by the spring of 1945, there were few other places in the dwindling area of German control in which large numbers of people could be held captive.

By the final days of April 1945, Theresienstadt had become a dumping ground for survivors of other camps, bringing with them infectious diseases such as dysentery and typhus. Moniek Goldberg, one of the teenage boys who was brought to Windermere, recalled that Theresienstadt was "a nightmare". "People were dying like so many flies," he remembered. "A lot of people had dysentery and were too weak to use the toilets. We could barely distinguish the living from the dead. But the worst of all was the stench. It was unbearable."

Unlike the adolescents, the young children brought to Britain from Theresienstadt had been captives in the ghetto-camp for years - indeed, none had any memories of life before the camp. In Theresienstadt, they had been housed in a special facility for infants, separated from their families and cared for by other inmates. Most of these children later had only hazy memories of the camp, but several remembered "lots of large rooms, with lots of beds", and a few recalled strange events such as being made to walk around naked in the spring sunshine - a cynical attempt on the part of the camp's guards to brighten the children's pale, nutrient-deprived complexions in anticipation of a visit from the Red Cross in June 1944. In September and October 1944, the infants' home and children's homes in Theresienstadt were liquidated, and the majority of the camp's children were sent eastwards to Auschwitz, where almost all were murdered upon arrival. Roughly 800 children remained, including the children who eventually made their way to Britain.

A temporary new home

It was not natural or inevitable that these child survivors of the Holocaust should have come to Britain. Home Office officials were in fact quite reluctant to allow even small numbers of child survivors into the country. But British Jewish aid workers were persuasive. These workers had, after all, ensured that nearly 10,000 children had been rescued from central Europe in 1938 and 1939, and brought to Britain via the Kindertransport scheme. In May 1945, philanthropist Leonard Montefiore, one of the founders of the Central British Fund (the key aid agency overseeing the children's rescue, which exists today as the humanitarian and development charity World Jewish Relief) had gone to Paris, where he had seen some of the first liberated concentration camp survivors. "I had never seen anything so ghastly in my life," he later wrote. "The people I saw were like corpses who walked. I shall never quite forget the impression they made."

It was not inevitable that these child survivors would come to Britain

Montefiore managed to persuade the Home Office to allow 1,000 children under the age of 16 to be brought to Britain for recuperation. All were to be granted temporary two-year visas, for Home Office officials insisted that the children should eventually move on. Nor was the government willing to put up any of the costs, so the considerable funds needed for the rescue effort came entirely from donations from Britain's Jewish community.

The next challenge was finding suitable children for the scheme. The Home Office had specified that the children must be under 16 but in the end, because few of the children had birth certificates or any other form of identification, many were older. The Home Office also specified they must be free of contagious diseases, but some were later found to have tuberculosis. In July 1945, news reached London that several hundred children had been saved from Theresienstadt and were healthy enough to make the trip to Britain. The Central British Fund rushed to prepare the Windermere reception centre. In August the children arrived, carried from the continent in specially adapted British bombers.

"Difficult to handle"

On the day of the children's arrival, Leonard Montefiore later recalled, "I still had in my mind the walking skeletons, with sunken eyes and yellow parchment skins, I had seen in Paris a few months earlier. It was a shock and a pleasant surprise to see the first batch get out of the planes, looking much fitter and stronger than anything we had expected." The children had in fact had two months' recovery time, in liberated Theresienstadt and then in Prague, to eat nourishing food and regain some of their strength. Some of the youngest children remembered with delight that they had been given ice cream in Prague, tasting this "marvellous pink confection" for the first time. Nonetheless, the children's bodies showed signs of damage from malnutrition: of the six toddlers, two had damage to their eyes from nutrient deficiency and another toddler had trouble walking.

Alice Goldberger and her staff at Windermere soon decided that because the young children were so few in number, it would be best for them to be moved into their own dedicated facilities as quickly as possible. Through Anna Freud's connections, a home was found for the six toddlers: after two months in Windermere, they moved into Bulldogs Bank, a cottage in West Hoathly, where they were cared for by German-Jewish emigré sisters Sophie and Gertrud Dann, who took careful notes on their behaviour. The Dann sisters noted that the toddlers were suspicious of adults, but had formed strong attachments to each other. They were "aggressive" and "difficult to handle", but equally nurturing and protective of the others in the group, in a way that is rarely true of ordinary siblings. Anna Freud later used the Dann sisters' notes on the toddlers as the basis for her paper An Experiment in Group Upbringing, in which she argued that the group had taken on some of the normal functions of parents for the Theresienstadt infants, deprived as they were of their own parents, and of any adequate parental substitutes. Published in 1951, the paper remains to this day a core text in the field of child psychology.

After the six toddlers were settled into Bulldogs Bank, Alice worked to secure a home for the remaining nine children who were between the ages of four and ten. Sir Benjamin Drage, a philanthropist who owned a chain of furniture stories, donated part of Weir Courtney, his estate in Lingfield, Surrey, for this purpose - and Alice herself volunteered to act as matron. Alice, her staff, and the children moved into Weir Courtney in December 1945, the children arriving to a house lit up with candles for the first night of Chanukah, which commemorates the second century BC rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Many later recalled their wonder at arriving at the beautiful, huge house at night to see its many windows shining with candlelight.

The toddlers were nurturing and protective of others in their group

Other children later joined the nine Theresienstadt children at Weir Courtney. Early in 1946, two additional groups of young child survivors arrived: some were survivors of Auschwitz, and some had survived the war in hiding and in orphanages. The Bulldogs Bank toddlers also joined the older children after a year.

What became of these children under Alice Goldberger's care, these young survivors of the Holocaust for whom Britain was meant to be a temporary way-station en route to somewhere else? Of the six toddlers, five were adopted relatively soon after joining the older children at Weir Courtney (despite foreign-born children not being legally allowed to be adopted in Britain until the 1950s). Of those aged between four and ten who arrived on Alice's birthday in 1945, one girl was found by an uncle and aunt, and went to live with them - although she believed for many years that they were in fact her father and mother. One girl had pronounced developmental problems, and was eventually sent to live in a specialised home for children with learning disabilities. One girl was adopted.

The rest, two boys and four girls, stayed with Alice, as did several of the children who arrived in 1946. Indeed, some stayed with Alice even when their own birth parents turned up alive (see boxout). They became family to each other. And despite the Home Office's insistence that the children's stay in Britain was temporary, most went on to live the rest of their lives in Britain. Alice fought for their right to become naturalised citizens and those still under her care were awarded citizenship in 1954.
Rebecca Clifford is associate professor of history at Swansea University. Her new book, Orphans of the Storm: Children After the Holocaust, will be published by Yale University Press in 2020. This article was first published in the January 2020 edition of History Revealed

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The Windermere Children: the remarkable stories of 300 child survivors of the Holocaust

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Together with a staff of around 35 people, Goldberger had worked to prepare a temporary reception centre near Windermere for the children. They had repurposed a set of barracks built during the war for aircraft factory workers, and had scrubbed and rescrubbed the dormitories. The beds had crisp white sheets.

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Above: This image of child Holocaust survivors, including 4-year-old Michael Bornstein (in front on the right), is from film footage taken by Soviet soldiers days after they liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Courtesy of Pańtswowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau

A child survivor of the Holocaust was reluctant to share his family's full story, until he saw a picture of himself as a 4-year-old boy at Auschwitz on a website denying the Holocaust

For years, Michael Bornstein, PHA '62, wished he could wash away the serial number- B-1148 -that was seared into his left forearm when he was just 4 years old. He'd mention Auschwitz, if asked about the tattoo, but he wouldn't dwell on the Nazi death camp where his father, brother, and nearly 1 million other Jews were murdered during World War II. He'd seldom speak of being separated from his mother, who withstood beatings from female guards as she smuggled bread and thin gray soup to him in the children's barracks, and who later smuggled him into the women's barracks before she was sent to a labor camp in Austria. He wouldn't say much about how his grandmother somehow, improbably, kept him alive long enough for them to be among the 2,819 prisoners liberated by Soviet soldiers.

His recollection of those dark days is dim-"a blessing and a curse," he says. He seems to recall the stench of bodies burning, the smoke rising from crematoria chimneys, the quickening clack of guards' boots. But he's also aware of the malleable nature of memory, how the things we recall, especially from early childhood, are shaped by some inscrutable mix of perception, imagination, and the stories we're told. And so for years he stayed mostly silent about his past, not only because it was traumatic but also because so much of it-the texture of his brother's hair, the sound of his father's voice-was inaccessible to him.

He preferred to look forward, with an optimism he says he inherited from his mother. Gam zeh ya'avor, she'd tell him, quoting the motto she and her husband shared during the war. This too shall pass. He can still hear the sound of his mother's voice because she found him in Żarki, Poland, after the war. In February 1951, when he was 10, they immigrated to the United States, where he'd go on to build a career in pharmaceutical research and-with his wife, Judy-raise four children in what he calls "a life filled with soccer games, birthday parties, and bliss."

As his kids grew up, they began pressing him for details about his past, but he'd always resist a full recounting. Now Bornstein is 77, and his children have children of their own. Several years ago, when Jake Wolf, the eldest of his 11 grandkids, started asking questions, wanting to use the information for his bar mitzvah project, Bornstein couldn't say no. He began to open up.

Then he saw something that left him stunned and more determined than ever to tell his story: a picture of himself as a boy at Auschwitz on a website claiming that the Holocaust is a lie, that it never happened. "I slammed my computer shut in disgust. I was horrified. My hands shook with anger," he writes in Survivors Club: The True Story of a Very Young Prisoner of Auschwitz, published last March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. "But now I'm almost grateful for the sighting. It made me realize that if we survivors remain silent-if we don't gather the resolve to share our stories-then the only voices left to hear will be those of the liars and bigots."

Bornstein wrote the book with his daughter Debbie Bornstein Holinstat, a TV news producer who for years had urged her father to work on such a project. She helped him plumb his earliest, darkest memories, and together they searched historical records and interviewed relatives and others who knew his family in Poland. In the process, they discovered a detail that helped solve one of the biggest mysteries of his survival, and he learned much about the resolute, resourceful father he never got to know. Together, they reclaimed a family heritage, illuminating stories of loss and resilience that had been left largely untold for 70 years.

Żarki, Open Ghetto

Michael Bornstein was born on May 2, 1940, in the Nazi-occupied town of Żarki, Poland, the second son of Sophie Jonisch Bornstein and Israel Bornstein, baby brother to 4-year-old Samuel. They lived in a redbrick house on Sosnawa Street.

In some parts of Poland during the late 1930s, Jews couldn't own land, and their business dealings were restricted. But Jewish-owned businesses thrived in Żarki, where more than half of the town's population, approximately 3,400 residents, was Jewish. Bornstein's father was an accountant, and his mother's brother Sam Jonisch (one of her six siblings) ran his family's leather tannery in town.

That changed on Friday, September 1, 1939, when German forces invaded Poland, reaching Żarki the following day with an aerial attack that torched some homes and businesses. Sophie, newly pregnant with Michael, wanted to check on her parents, who lived nearby. But Nazi storm troopers had already moved onto the streets. On Monday, when all Jewish men in Żarki were ordered to report for labor shifts, Sophie left Samuel with her mother-in-law, Dora, and set out to find her parents. As she neared the Jewish cemetery, she saw German soldiers command a family she recognized from synagogue to strip naked. As mother, father, and young daughter huddled together, the soldier fired three shots, and the family fell dead in the ditch the father had just dug. It was a scene that haunted Sophie Bornstein her entire life.

The Nazis murdered more than 1,000 Jews in Poland that day, including 100 in Żarki. Such atrocities brought out the worst in some gentile residents, Bornstein and Holinstat write. "Many Catholics had not liked living among Jews before the war. Now they blamed the town's Jewish people for making them the target of German bombings."

In October, as Nazi soldiers went door-to-door confiscating Jews' money and jewelry, Israel Bornstein sought to safeguard his family's valuables. He gathered what he could in a burlap sack-a string of pearls, a stash of banknotes, the family's small silver kiddush cup-and buried it in the backyard.

Żarki was still an open ghetto at the time, which meant that it wasn't surrounded by fences, but Jews couldn't come and go as they pleased. The Nazis shut down or took over Jewish businesses, enforced a strict curfew, and made Jews wear white armbands with a blue Star of David on them. They also forced them to create a Judenrat, a council of Jewish leaders. The town elders elected Israel Bornstein to serve as president. It was not a coveted role. Many Jews in Eastern Europe came to see Judenrat members as traitors, simply doing the bidding of the Nazis, and in Żarki people viewed Israel with suspicion.

But in their research, Bornstein and Holinstat found a collection of essays and a detailed diary written in Hebrew that told of Israel Bornstein's heroic, often successful efforts to make conditions more bearable. In Survivors Club, they describe how he collected money from fellow Judenrat members and used the funds to bribe Gestapo officers, helping to obtain 200 legal travel visas for families trying to leave Żarki, for example, and saving the life of a teenager who faced execution because he was too sick to work one day.

"Though it's sometimes seen as a very negative position, my father used it to save people. He set up soup kitchens. He was a very good man. And it made a lot of difference to me knowing that he was a good man," Bornstein says. "That's one reason we called the book 'Survivors Club,' because my mother's six siblings all survived, and part of it has to do with my father, who encouraged them to go into attics, basements, wherever they could go to survive."

By October 1942, however, the call had come for Żarki to be made Judenrein, "clean of Jews." Most of those remaining were sent by train either to labor camps or to extermination camps. The Bornsteins and approximately 120 others were allowed to stay behind as part of a cleanup crew, but eventually they too were sent away, to a labor camp in Pionki. And in July 1944, when that camp closed, they were packed onto trains bound for Auschwitz.

"Sickness Saved My Life"

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, like all families, they were split up: Israel and Samuel were assigned to the men's side. Michael initially stayed with his mother and grandmother until guards shaved his head and tattooed his arm. He was sent to the children's barracks, where some older kids looked out for him, warning him to hold his nose as he drank down the smelly gray soup. Other kids stole his bread. Sophie was sent to the women's barracks with Michael's grandma Dora. She risked her own well-being to find her son and eventually bring him into the women's barracks, where he hid under straw, in corners, scattering at the sound of guards approaching to take roll call.

While Sophie was able to protect Michael, she was helpless to save her husband and young Samuel, who died in September from the effects of Zyklon B gas-the Nazis' preferred method of execution at Auschwitz, where as many as 6,000 people per day were killed in gas chambers. "[My mother] later told me that her heart literally felt like it had been gouged from her chest with an ax" when she learned of their fate, Bornstein writes. Soon, however, she was sent to a labor camp in Austria, and Michael was left alone with his grandma Dora.

By January 1945, with Soviet forces closing in on Auschwitz, the Nazis started to evacuate the camp, forcing an estimated 60,000 prisoners on what came to be known as a death march to concentration camps in Germany. Many prisoners, already frail from malnutrition, died from exposure in the harsh winter. But Michael and Dora evaded the march, and Bornstein always wondered how.

Not long ago, while visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Israel, he discovered a document that solved the mystery. Nazi records indicate that he was in the infirmary at the time, diagnosed with either diphtheria or dystrophy (the writing is unclear). And his grandmother was with him. "The name doesn't really matter," he writes in Survivors Club. "That piece of paper recovered by a museum years after the war made one miracle clear. Sickness saved my life."

On January 27, nine days after he found refuge in the infirmary, Soviet troops arrived. A couple of days after liberation, Dora carried Michael out to freedom, a scene captured on film by Soviet cameras. "Of the hundreds of thousands of children who had been delivered by train to Auschwitz, only 52 under the age of eight survived. They were the world's best hiders," Bornstein writes. "I was one of them."

Postwar Dangers and the Cup of Life

Bornstein's freedom brought with it a new set of dangers. "I would like to tell you ... that all of us went home and lived happily ever after," he writes. "But it wasn't like that at all." Four out of 10 Jews who survived the concentration camps died within a few weeks of the arrival of the Allied armies. Those who did survive found much of Eastern Europe unsafe for them, particularly in Poland, where anti-Jewish sentiments led to a series of murderous pogroms.

Soon after liberation, Michael and Dora returned to Żarki, where they found the family home on Sosnawa Street had been seized by a Polish family who now saw it as their home. Dora took Michael to a farm on the edge of town, where they found shelter in a chicken coop. They would periodically head into what had been the Jewish quarter, where they met relatives who were, miraculously, among the few dozen Jews (out of 3,400 six years earlier) to return to Żarki after the war. One day, as Michael and Dora walked in town, he spotted his mother, who had made her way back from Austria. "If we had both seen more horror than the world knew it could hold-then this moment was the opposite of that," he writes. "This was the opposite of despair."

Sophie realized that there was little opportunity left for them in Żarki. But first she tried to recover the valuables her husband had buried. "At night, even though the house was occupied, she went digging with her bare hands to try to find these things, jewels and money, and the only thing that she found was the kiddush cup, which is a cup that you make blessings with," Bornstein says.

"And so this cup has been in our family ever since. It's been at my wedding, at our kids' weddings, at their bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, and so on. It's not worth much if you buy it for the silver, but we cherish it quite a bit."

In Munich, Waiting on Passage to America

After the war, Dora decided to remain in Poland, but Sophie determined that she and Michael would apply for visas to the United States. "She said the word 'America' the way a child says the word 'candy,'" Bornstein writes. "She told me America was the most wonderful and welcoming place you can imagine." That was not the case for them in Żarki or in Munich, where the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society assigned them to a displaced persons camp and, later, to a one-room apartment in the city.

"The German kids were bullies," Bornstein recalls. "I had no hair on my head, I was skinny, and I didn't speak the language, so I was bullied quite a bit." Sophie bought flour and nylons from American soldiers and sailors in Munich, and sold the goods on the black market. It was a risky way to make a living, and Bornstein feared that she'd be arrested and he'd lose his mother again. But after nearly six years, they received their visas and set off on the USS General M. B. Stewart, arriving in New York City in February 1951.

With help from aid organizations, they eventually settled in a small apartment on 98th Street and Madison Avenue. Sophie worked as a seamstress, making $30 a week, and Michael attended P.S. 6. "I was this little kid who didn't speak much English and had a tattoo on his arm. The teachers didn't say anything, so I was pretty much alone and didn't have friends," recalls Bornstein, who soon found a job that would prove to be consequential. "I worked at Feldman's Pharmacy, at 96th and Madison, getting 50 cents an hour," he says. "The head pharmacist, Victor Oliver, was very good to me. He kind of took me on as a father figure and sparked my interest in science."

Oliver even attended Bornstein's bar mitzvah, held at Park Avenue Synagogue, after which his mother gave him a gift that she'd been saving for years to buy him: a gold watch. "You have to wind it a few times a day to make it work, but it's great," he says. "And on the back, it has a gimel and a zayin, which are the Hebrew letters for gam zeh ya'avor, 'This too shall pass.'"

"A Can-Do, Get-It-Done Type of Guy"

Bornstein's mother also instilled in him a deep appreciation for the value of education. Like faith, she'd tell him, education can't be taken away. In 1958, he enrolled at Fordham's College of Pharmacy, just as she embarked on a new chapter in her life. "My mother remarried and moved to Cuba because her sister was there," he says. She would later return to the States and settle in South Florida, but at the time, Bornstein says, "I was pretty much homeless, and Fordham didn't have any room in the dormitories, so they put me up in the infirmary." It was the second time in his life that an infirmary saved him, he says. "I would probably have skipped college if it weren't for that."

In addition to providing Bornstein with room and board, Fordham gave him a partial scholarship. He spent summers working in the Catskills to help pay any remaining tuition costs. "I was a chamber maid, then a busboy, then a waiter, and finally a head waiter," he recalls. "The salary was only about twelve dollars a month, but the tips made it." On campus, he found a niche on the fencing team.

One of his former Fordham classmates, William Stavropoulos, PHA '61, recalls Bornstein as a "nice, friendly guy." He says he and his friends in G House at Martyrs' Court never would have suspected the horrors Bornstein had been through. "I remember distinctly sitting around one day and a guy asked Mike about his tattoo. He mentioned the camp and said his mother used to hide him here and there, keep him out of sight of the guards, but he didn't say much else. He was always upbeat."

After graduation, Bornstein enrolled at the University of Iowa, where he earned a Ph.D. in pharmaceutics and analytical chemistry. But he says his greatest achievement there was meeting an undergraduate named Judy Cohan. "We obviously hit it off. He had the same interests I did, and he was persistent," recalls Judy, who was studying special education. They attended movies and plays, and he accompanied her on visits to the children's ward at local hospitals. "He was very caring of the children, and that was important to me."

They were married nearly 50 years ago, on July 9, 1967, after Bornstein began his career at Dow Chemical in Zionsville, Indiana. While there, he reconnected with Stavropoulos, who had earned a Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry at the University of Washington and would go on to become chairman and CEO of Dow. The two, both newlyweds at the time, would see each other socially, and Stavropoulos even helped the Bornsteins move into their new apartment. But they lost touch over the years. "He went to work for Eli Lilly, and I stayed at Dow," Stavropoulos recalls. In the late 1980s, Bornstein and his family moved to New Jersey, where he worked as a research manager for Johnson & Johnson, eventually rising to director of technical operations, a position that took him to Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, France, and elsewhere.

"He was a streetwise guy, and I always knew he was going to be a success," Stavropoulos says. "When I think of Mike, I think of a positive, can-do, get-it-done type of guy. At Dow he was that way, and at Fordham too. It's an incredible story. He's obviously a courageous man."

Fighting Intolerance with Compassion

Holinstat says her dad's courage was especially evident during the process of writing the book. "My father is such a positive man, and he's gone out of his way his entire life to show his kids and his grandkids nothing but positivity, so for him to dig deep and be willing to open up and talk to me about the deepest, darkest places in his memory was difficult for him, and it was hard for me because I knew how hard it was for him." But the process has been well worth it, she says, explaining that they wrote Survivors Club with readers as young as 10 years old in mind.

"For my dad, a big piece of this was making sure that his grandkids understood the atrocities of the Holocaust. So it was really important to us to write something that the kids could grasp at this stage in their lives, and that they could share with their peers, because this next generation, most of them will grow up not having met a Holocaust survivor."

In March, shortly after the book was published, it became a New York Times best-seller. The paper's reviewer noted that the book combines the "emotional resolve of a memoir with the rhythm of a novel," and that, although the book is marketed for young readers, "the equal measures of hope and hardship in its pages lend appeal to an audience of all ages."

Holinstat waited decades for the opportunity to help her father tell his story, but she feels the timing of the book's publication could not be more poignant or pointed, coming amid a recent surge in anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiments in the U.S. "I truly believe that this story is being released now for a reason, to remind people what happens when bigotry goes unanswered," she says.

The core moral lesson of the Holocaust, she and her father believe, is the ease with which any group of people can be dehumanized. "The world can never forget what happens when discrimination is ignored," Bornstein said last April at Congregation Beth-El Zedeck in Indianapolis. "And it's not just discrimination against Jewish people but against all minorities, and that includes Muslims, Mexicans, and African Americans. It's time for compassion; it's time for empathy."

Bornstein plans to return to Poland this year with Judy, their children, and other family members. Holinstat has been communicating with people in Poland about establishing a Holocaust memorial in Żarki, and the family will be going to Auschwitz, which Bornstein visited in 2001 with Judy and in 2010 with his son, Scott.

In the meantime, Jake Wolf, the grandson who persuaded Bornstein to share his story, is preparing for his freshman year at Syracuse University, where he intends to major in both communications and business. "In our family," he says, "it's so important to know how difficult it was for my grandpa. He never had any hate toward the world for what he was put through. And that inspires all of us. If he could get through that with a smile on his face, we can do anything."

A "Survivors Club" Reunion in the Suburbs

Since the publication of the book, Bornstein has heard from many people who have thanked him for telling his story, including some who understand all too well what he and his family endured. Sarah Ludwig was the 4-year-old girl standing next to Bornstein in the iconic photo from Auschwitz. Tovah Friedman, then 6, stood just behind Ludwig as the children showed their tattoos to Soviet soldiers. The three survivors recently learned that they live just miles from each other in suburban New Jersey.

On Sunday, June 4, they gathered with kids, grandkids, and other relatives for a reunion brunch at Holinstat's home that included prayers of remembrance and celebration, and the use of one precious silver cup. For Holinstat, it was a remarkable coda to the experience of helping her father tell his story after all these years.

"The last time they saw each other, they were kids wearing prisoners' stripes," she says. "Now they're surrounded by family."
-Ryan Stellabotte is the editor of this magazine. Watch NBC Nightly News' coverage of the reunion.

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Stories Survive: A Child of the Holocaust Reclaims a Resilient Heritage

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A child survivor of the Holocaust was reluctant to share his family's full story, until he saw a picture of himself as a 4-year-old boy at Auschwitz on a website denying the Holocaust For years, Michael Bornstein, PHA '62, wished he could wash away the serial number-B-1148-that was seared into his left forearm when heRead More