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.
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”.
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.
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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