Bronx Holocaust survivors tell their survival stories on Yom HaShoah
NEW YORK -- Monday night marks the beginning of Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.
"This was the first picture taken of me after the war," Helen Weiss told CBS2 as she went through a photo album.
For 100 years, Weiss has collected memories that now surround her. As she looks back on them, she says she remembers her story of how she survived the Holocaust.
"It's really unbelievable what a person can live through, but you have to ... I mean I had no choice," she said. "I was caught and taken to a concentration camp in the Slovak part and I was kept there for several days."
Weiss was born in 1922 and was a young adult when World War II began, living in Czechoslovakia. She and her sister managed to flee to Hungary, where they hid under disguise as Christians. Her mother and sister were the only two that didn't survive.
"Jews were taken to Auschwitz, eventually killed in the gas chambers," she explained.
"They probably died. As a matter of fact, most of them did," Curt Shulman said as he held on to a photo of his mother's family.
He was 9 years old and living in Germany in 1938. Just two weeks before World War II started, Shulman says his dad insisted on them leaving as the Nazis began a wave of violence against the Jews, called Kristallnacht.
"What I remember the next day is going out and I think it may have been the first times when I was really afraid," he said
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His family took one of the last ships out of Portugal and headed to Cuba.
"We managed to survive being Jews," Shulman said.
Weiss and Shulman are living history of the Jewish survival during the Holocaust and say they share their stories and traditions to keep them alive.
"No matter what happened, I was always a Jew," Shulman said.
Both survived the deadly antisemitism that plagued their communities in Europe. But fast forward to today, the Anti-Defamation League says hate-filled incidents and attacks against Jewish people are the highest it has seen since it first started tracking events. They also say there's been a steady increase in conspiracy theories denying the Holocaust ever happened.
"I don't understand. How could you not know what goes on in the world?" Weiss said.
Weiss and Shulman say the best way to move forward as a country is to spread kindness to all those around you.
"What I think we all ought to do is look at the other person and just try to understand them," Shulman said.