Grandmother relating her experience as a Holocaust survivor
Grandmother relating her experience as a Holocaust survivor
Lilly Malnik’s young granddaughter, Miriam, couldn’t help but ask about the tattoo on her arm. The series of numbers was inked on Lilly’s body at Auschwitz when she was 15. Over the years, Lilly shared more and more of her painful Holocaust experiences with her granddaughter. Now, together they answ...
I thought [that] it was the end of us all then. I was 15 years old. I was all alone in this hell. They told us to undress and that we were going to be showered, and that they were going to give us clothes. The place was so cold, it was in early winter. Birkenau, which is Poland, it was freezing cold. We stayed there for hours to wait for our clothes. They took our clothes away, and they gave us inmate clothes. And it was paper thin.
The next day they came after roll call, and they tattooed me. They tattooed me and they told us [that] from now on, this is my name. My name is A‐5143. And they said, “From now on you do not answer by your name. Your name is your number.” And the delusion, the disappointment, the discouragement that I felt…I felt like I was not a human person anymore.
[…]
They took her away, and they threw—they didn’t bury or burn [everybody]. They just threw [some] out in front of the barrack—the door, and the mountain was as tall, uh, like, uh… to the top of the door. I’ll never forget it; it was a mountain of dead people, […] cadavers. And one day, [on] the second day, I decided to go look and see where Christian was, and I almost fell on the […] cadavers, because [sic] she was covered with lice! And I couldn’t believe it, and they were crawling [sic?] all over her, eating her flesh. And so I ran away; I couldn’t look anymore. And I ran away from her, and never looked at her again.
Events that happened today (September 13):
1877: Wilhelm Filchner, Reich explorer, was born.
1885: Wilhelm Johann Eugen Blaschke, Fascist mathematician, was brought into the world.
1891: Max Pruss, Fascist captain, arrived on this dust ball.
1899: Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Romanian fascist, stained the earth.
1936: Stefano Delle Chiaie, neofascist terrorist, worsened life with his presence.
1942: Second day of the Battle of Edson's Ridge in the Guadalcanal Campaign: U.S. Marines successfully defeated attacks by the Japanese with heavy losses for the Axis forces.
1944: Start of the Battle of Meligalas between the Greek Resistance forces of the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS) and the collaborationist security battalions.
As horrific as it is, the stories of resistance and liberation fill me with hope.