Echoes of Memory

Read reflections and testimonies written by Holocaust survivors in their own words.

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Refugees
It is 1946 in the Robert Taylor Displaced Persons camp (DP camp, later known also as Delayed Pilgrims camp). I am five years old. I share one room in a wooden barracks with my Dziadzio and Babcia. It is winter. Snowflakes float gently to land on icy-cold mud. Babcia has bundled me in every warm garment she can locate, whether it fits or not. I wear two pairs of Dziadzio’s socks on my hands. They cover my arms to the shoulders as well as my fingers. I sport a pair of someone’s leggings rolled up several times. My feet are bundled in rags. A knitted wool cap kept in place by a heavy babushka completes this outfit.
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Bosnia, 2016
In the summer of 2016, I went to Bosnia. I have been interested in Sarajevo for a long time.
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- echoes of memory volume 10
- Louise Laurence-Israëls
Where Are You, Tola?
I last held you when you were six months old and I was almost three. It was March 1943, a time of war, Nazis, and unthinkable persecution of our people. To give you, my sister, a chance to live, Dziadzio changed your name from “Tola Weinstock,” a Jew, to “Antonina Nowicka,” a Catholic. You were fair-haired, with our father’s blue eyes, so you could easily pass as a Catholic Polish child. He took you to Dr. Groer’s Catholic orphanage and paid them to keep you safe.
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My Dziadzio’s Legs. Lager, Late 1947
In late 1947, my grandpa (dziadzio), step-grandmother (babcia), and six-and-a-half-year-old I (Jula) lived in Tyler Displaced Persons camp (DP camp) in Wegscheid, near Linz, Austria. Tyler DP camp, also known as Wegscheid I DP camp, was the largest and most primitive DP camp in Austria. It was considered temporary shelter for people emigrating to other places. Each family was assigned one room in the camp (lager) composed of weathered, splintery, wooden barracks. On the right side of the lager and a bit away from the barracks were outdoor wooden shacks with toilets all attached in a row. Water was available from two outside spigots. We lived in barrack 13, near one of the spigots. I do not remember our room number nor the total number of rooms in our barrack.
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Escaping from Evil
Growing up in a rural area where many people were uneducated, I always thought that in the cities, especially in Western Europe, where people had access to higher education and city life, they would behave in a more civilized way than people where I lived. Growing up in a democratic country like Czechoslovakia, even as a seven- or eight-year-old kid, I felt very proud of our country, because we were treated as citizens. That does not mean that our neighbors who were “Russ” were not antisemitic; they were. However, we did coexist and got along.
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Pocahontas, Arkansas
It had been a long time since the Speakers Bureau of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum requested that I give a presentation in a far-off place, so when I received an e-mail asking me to go to Pocahontas, Arkansas, I was delighted. The trip was sponsored by Black River Technical College, and I was scheduled to give three lectures to 800 people at each session. It was to be a four-day trip: two days to get there and back, and two days for the speeches themselves. Museum staff member Emily Potter accompanied me on the trip.
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Children Far Away
Last week I had a wonderful opportunity to peer back deep into my memory when Emily Potter asked me to engage in a videoconference with 35 eighth- and tenth-grade students at Costa Rica’s La Paz School. I felt sure that I was going to be an interesting object in the eyes of those students while recording the conference, sitting in the room where our artistically boundless writers of Echoes of Memory meetings take place, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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- echoes of memory volume 10
- antisemitism
Ashburn Colored School
When Diane Saltzman, the Museum’s director of Survivor and Council Stewardship, sent me an e-mail to ask me to speak at a program in Ashburn, Virginia, at a schoolhouse that had been defaced with graffiti, I had already heard and read about the historic one-room Ashburn Colored School. The phrase “white power,” swastikas, profanities, and crude drawings were spray painted in black, blue, and red on the outside of the wooden walls and windows. Diane informed me that I was to speak for only a short time with other invited presenters. I accepted the invitation because I wanted to be part of that historic occasion, and I wanted to do something to confront hatred. I did not know where the school was located and what was being or would be done with it.
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- echoes of memory volume 10
- Susan Warsinger

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