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.

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.

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.

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