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Viola Fisher - "Mengele´s girl" holocaust survivor from Slovakia

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Viola Fisher - "Mengele´s girl" holocaust survivor from Slovakia

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Viola Fischerová was born in 1922 in Lučenec. When she was sixteen, southern Slovakia was occupied by the Hungarians. They had to hide with their family, survived air raids, enormous psychological pressure. Their property was confiscated, those marked with yellow stars were excluded from society, they were transferred to a ghetto established in the city, where they were brutally treated. They beat everyone, took the girls and raped them. They couldn't imagine that there was anything worse, but at the age of twenty-two she got off the cattle car on the ramp in Auschwitz. There she met Dr. Josef Mengele for the first time, but not for the last time. She became a victim of his pseudo-medical experiments. She survived. After some time, she was transferred to another camp, she organized seven other women and they managed to escape. While she was fighting for her life in the concentration camps, her later husband, Juraj Fischer, was a tank commander in the Allied army. He also participated in the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944. In 2004, he received the highest French award - Knight of the Legion of Honor. Viola Fischer never forgot the hell she lived through. He constantly pursues her.

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Her story was very tragic. She couldn’t speak about what happened to her for 50 years. She was born on 28. august in Bratislava. She took prohibitions very hard. She couldn’t go to cinema with her friends. She also couldn’t olay piano. Edita was 16 when she and her family were deported to Auschwitz. Then she was deported to Ravensbrück. We should speak about holocaust because it is important that holocaust doesn’t happen again.

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Susan was born an only child to a conservative Jewish family in Roznava, Slovakia. Her mother and father owned a dry-goods store. Susan was thirteen years old when the war began. News of the evils of the concentration campsreached Roznava and Susan’s father decided to take his family out of Slovakia as fast as possible. Her father had a brother in the United States that would assist her family in receiving Visas. They sailed into New York City on the S.S. Washington on August 3, 1939.

Susan was placed into an all female public school. Her English was very poor and her peers ridiculed her because she was an immigrant. She was an outstanding student and furthered her education at Brooklyn College. She moved to Washington, DC in 1948 when a close college friend found her a job in the US Army Map Service; she read documents in Hungarian and summarized them into English. She met her husband in the Service and was later married in 1950. Susan is a retired elementary school art teacher.

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Helena was born in 1923 to a Jewish family in Bratislava. During the war, she and her family were deported to the concentration camp in Sereď and later to Auschwitz. After the war, Helena returned to Slovakia and actively participated in documenting the history of the Holocaust and educating future generations about these horrors.

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She was born in 1923 in Levice. He has a younger sister and brother. In 1944, they were transported to Auschwitz. In the winter of 44 they went to a factory in Germany. Marta and her sister survived, the parents were declared old. When she came to him from the camp, she lived with her sister in an abandoned house. Her husband Martin came home and they started a new life. They have 2 children and moved to Nitra

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BORN: FEBRUARY 18, 1930

DIED: JANUARY 19, 2013, ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND

Norbert was born to a Jewish family in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. His father, a prominent lawyer, was also active in the Jewish community, heading relief efforts for the city’s Jewish orphans. On September 1, 1939, while on a family vacation we heard over the radio that war World War II had begun. My parents exchanged worried glances; what would happen to us now? Bulgaria had close ties with the Germans and we were frightened. At the newsstand I saw antisemitic headlines appear for the first time in the papers speaking of the Jews’ “international conspiracy.” I asked my father to help me understand what was happening. 1940–44: In May 1943 my family was deported to Pleven in northern Bulgaria. It wasn’t like the deportations we’d heard about; we lived with relatives and I even attended a public school. The Soviet army arrived on September 9, 1944. The Bulgarian partisans descended from the mountains and started rounding up town officials. I happened to be in the street so I helped. While the chief of police was held at gunpoint, I searched his pockets. I was shaking worse than the police chief. Norbert finished high school in Sofia after the war. In 1948 he emigrated to Israel and later moved to the United States.

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Born Kurt Gerson into a well-off merchant family in Berlin, he studied medicine before being called up for military service in World War I. After being seriously wounded, he was qualified as a military doctor in the German Army, despite having been only in his second year at university. After the war Gerron turned to a stage career, becoming a theatre actor under director Max Reinhardt in 1920. He appeared in secondary roles in several silent films and began directing film shorts in 1926.

After the 1933 seizure of power by the Nazis, Gerron left Nazi Germany with his wife and parents, traveling first to Paris and later to Amsterdam. He continued work there as an actor at the Stadsschouwburg and directed several movies. Several times he was offered employment in Hollywood through the agency of Peter Lorre and Josef von Sternberg, but Gerron refused to leave Europe.

After the Wehrmacht occupied the Netherlands, Gerron and his parents were first interned in the transit camp at Westerbork. His parents were deported on May 5, 1943, and murdered in Sobibor. Gerron and his wife were later sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. There he was forced by the SS to stage the cabaret review, Karussell,in which he reprised Mack the Knife, as well as compositions by Martin Roman and other imprisoned musicians and artists.

In 1944, Gerron was coerced into directing a Nazi propaganda film intended to be viewed in "neutral" nations such as Switzerland, Sweden, and Ireland, for example, showing how "humane" conditions were at Theresienstadt. Once filming was finished, Gerron and members of the Jazz pianist Martin Roman's Ghetto Swingers were deported on the camp's final train transport to Auschwitz, on 28 October. Gerron and his wife were murdered in the gas chamber immediately upon arrival on 30 October 1944, along with the film's entire performing entourage (except for Roman and guitarist Coco Schumann). The next day, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the closure of the gas chambers.

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She was dragged to Auschwitz in the first Jewish transport from Slovakia in March 1942. When the war ended, she weighted only 35 kilograms.  She recalled that the prisoners only had tea for breakfast, soup for lunch and a piece of bread with a little margarine in the evening.  In the morning, instead of drinking the tea, she washed with it.  She toiled like a slave, with Nazi overseers sometimes forcing them to work barefoot.

She survived not only the concentration camp, but also the so-called death march, when the Germans drove the prisoners away from the approaching Soviet army for eight days and nights.  Her hardships did not end completely with her liberation, because she also enslaved in the boiler room in Auschwitz, which cost her damaged health. She had to be treated for tuberculosis.  She was lucky because she was a village girl.  She was able to bear the burden because she helped her parents in the household from the age of 10.  In Auschwitz, she saw girls who were brought up in silk, and therefore many could not cope with the very hard work.

At the end, she said that she was destined to experience a concentration camp. She said that because she wanted to teach young people to not be cruel to the others and that they should respect the others. "I think you woldn't like it, if they did to you things, which you did to them." she said.

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Rudolf Vrba, was sa Walter Rosenberg in 1924 in Topoľčany, Slovakia. In 1942, at the age of 18, he was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

In the camp, Vrba worked in the Sonderkommando, a group of prisoners forced to dispose of the bodies of those who were killed in the gas chambers and crematoria. This work allowed him to see firsthand, the horrors of the extermination and to gather detailed information about the operation of the camp.

In April 1944, Vrba and his friend Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz. They crossed the Beskydy mountains and reached Slovakia, where with the help of the Slovak resistance, they managed to get to Hungary and later to Switzerland.

After the war, Vrba and Wetzler published a report of Auschwitz, which was one of the first detailed accounts of the extermination of the Jews. The report helped to inform the world about the horrors of the Holocaust and contributed to the pressure on the Allied forces to bomb the camp and the railway lines leading to it.

Made by Ľuboš Szpisják

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One of not many that not only survived, but escaped! Together with Rudolf Vrba they escaped from Auschwitz Birkenau, traveled by foot for days and finally wrote down 32 page long report and showed it to jews in Trnava. This is the story how the whole world get to know what really are Nacis doing

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Merchant Marko Diamant from Brehy  - victim

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Merchant Marko Diamant from Brehy  - victim

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His wife was Etela Schlezingerová, who worked with him in the store. They had 3 children together. One of the children was the son Karol, who was born in Brehy in 1906. He graduated from college and received enginer degree. He married Piroška Bergerová, with whom he had one child. The unfortunate fate of Marko began in 1939, when his wife was murdered in Brehy. Two years later, in the summer of 1941, it was deprived of business as part of the legal liquidation of Jewish property. No arizator took over his shop so it was closed. In 1943, Mark's son Karol was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, where he also perished. In the end, the life of Marko Diamant himself ended in Brehy. Shortly before the end of the war in 1945, he was shot as an elderly man. A small band-aid for the wounds of the Diamant family's fate is that the daughter managed to escape to Israel, where his grandson still lives.

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Alica Weiszfeiler, was born on 28 November 1933 in Moravská Ostrava. Her family was of Jewish descent and immigrated from Slovakia. It was getting harder and harder for the Jews to live in Bratislava, so my father decided to move with his family to Kežmarok. The family was later forced to hide in Kežmarok to avoid being transported to concentration camps. Skončila pred krematóriami tábora Auschwitz-Birkenau, kde nacisti rodinu rozdelili. Later she moved to Israel and Alice went to study in Belgium. After her studies, she found herself in Israel, where she started a new life and eventually married Alfred Weiszfeiler. 10 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren were born into her family.

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Ester Gelbelman

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Holocaust Survivor Testimonies: Romania- Ester Gelbelman

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Beyond the Fence. The Story of a Holocaust Survivor

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Holocaust Survivor Testimony :Andrei Călăraşu

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I Survived The Holocaust Twin Experiments | This Is That Story | BuzzFeed Video

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"The Death Trap"  - Transnistria:  Holocaust Survivor Testimonies

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Holocaust Survivor Testimony: Yosef Finkelstein%

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Yosef Finkelstein was born in 1922 in Iasi, Romania, the elder of two brothers. In 29 June 1941, when the Germans headed through the city in the direction of the front, all the Jews of the city were gathered by Romanian soldiers and local criminals and were ordered to report to the police station. The women and children were permitted to return home; however, the men - including Yosef, his father and brother - were marched to the train station and turned over to German soldiers, who beat them with clubs until they bled, and loaded them into terribly congested cattle cars.

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Holocaust Survivor Testimony: Yosef Finkelstein

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Holocaust survivor Ester Gelbelman describes the killing site Bogdanovka in Romania.