Chicago Holocaust Survivor Recalls Painful Memories On Anniversary Of The Liberation Of Auschwitz
(CBS) -- As world leaders gathered in Poland Tuesday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a Chicago woman who survived the notorious Nazi extermination camp is recalling her painful memories. The story from WBBM's Regine Schlesinger.
93-year-old Edith Stern spent most of the Holocaust in the Terezin concentration camp in her native Czechoslovakia, but in October of 1944, she and her mother were put on a train. They were told they would be reunited with their husbands at a German labor camp, but quickly realized the train was headed east instead. They arrived at a place they'd vaguely heard of called Auschwitz.
"And the Kapos started screaming at us, 'Out! Out! Out!'" Stern said.
She and her mother were immediately separated; her mother sent in one direction and she in the other.
"I wanted to go with her and he said, 'No, no no, only old people. They go by buses and you have to walk.'"
She didn't know about the gas chambers at Auschwitz until a woman leading them to the processing facility told them as they passed the chimneys.
"She was screaming 'Do you see the fire? Do you see the flames? Those are your parents, those are your children, those are your husbands' and we looked at each other, what is she talking about?"
Stern and a sister were the only ones of their family who survived the Holocaust. The lesson she sees: "People shouldn't hate each other, that it is the worst thing that you can do, not only to the person whom you hate but you hurt yourself."