By Dan Murphy
When 300 students walk into a room, there’s usually a lot of commotion and chatter going on. But on this occasion last week, all of the students from the two or three elementary schools in Yonkers were respectful and quietly awaiting the guest speaker as they entered the Lincoln Park Jewish Center, also in Yonkers.
This year marks the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where about 1.5 million people – mostly Jews – were killed. Those in attendance March 20 had the honor of listening to Auschwitz and Holocaust survivor Judy Altmann tell her horrific story of death and survival.
Altmann, who is now 93 years old, was one of the speakers in the JCY-Westchester Community Partners Holocaust Remembrance Program. “There’s only a few of us left and you are the last generation of students who will hear from survivors,” she told the students. “It’s important for you to remember.”
Altmann was taken from her home in Czechoslovakia at the age of 14. “I was offered the chance to go to England but I didn’t want to leave my parents,” she said. “One day two SS men knocked on our door and told us we had a half an hour to take our money and jewelry. We started marching and were placed in a ghetto in Hungary.”
The four-day train ride from Czechoslovakia to Hungary was the first part of Altmann’s Hell that she endured, but came out of. “The doors were locked, and we had no food and little water,” she said. “People went crazy and died in the train cars right next to us.”
Upon arrival at the infamous Auschwitz camp, Altmann and her family came face-to-face with Joseph Mengele, “the angel of death” for the Nazis who conducted tortuous experiments on Jews, twins and children.
“If you were between the ages of 14 and 35, you were ‘spared’ and went to the left,” she recalled. “Anyone younger or older than that age was sent to the right…and to their deaths. I saw my father for the last time and he said ‘Judy you will live.’ Those words stuck with me forever…The ‘showers’ were next, in our case there was water in the shower, for our parents it was gas.”
Altmann lost 24 members of her family at Auschwitz. The barracks for Altmann and the others were filled with disease and overcrowding. “I smelled what I thought was burning hair, and I was told it was my parents burning,” she said.
Altmann and the other young, healthy prisoners were taken the Essen and Gelsenkirchen labor camps, where the work was hard. “Role call was at 5:30 a.m., and sometimes they had to drag the dead out to be counted,” she said. “We had a few minutes to use the bathroom one time a day and got meager food – a bowl of soup and bread. You were allowed to shower one time per week, but we always wondered if it was really going to be a shower or a gas chamber.”
In 1945, after surviving two years of torturous living, Altmann was forced on what was later called the “Death March” to Bergen Belsen, which is the same camp that Anne Frank was placed in; Frank died two weeks before Altmann got to Bergen Belsen, a place where “we were left to die.”
“The walk took three weeks and there was a mountain of dead bodies,” she said. “Friends and family were dying in front of you.”
Little did Altmann and the others know, Germany was losing the war, and the end came April 14, 1945 when British troops liberated Altmann and those left alive at Bergen Belsen. She went to Sweden after the war and came to America in 1948. She married and has two sons and two granddaughters.
Altmann, who lives in Stamford, Conn., travels around the country to speak about the Holocaust and make sure that younger generations hear her story firsthand. The horrors that Altmann spoke of at the Lincoln Park Jewish Center left most listeners with tears in their eyes, but with a love and respect for Altmann and what she went through: If 14-year-old Judy Altmann can survive the loss of her parents and the death, torture and mistreatment of the Jews and the Holocaust, it should give all of us the spirit and dedication to make it through the difficult times in our lives.
Altmann’s speech, and the comments from the seven other Holocaust survivors and WWII veterans, who spoke to more than 2,000 Yonkers Public School students last week, serve two purposes: They provide a firsthand account, and proof, from someone who lived through the Holocaust that these events did occur.
Second, it provides students with a message of standing up for injustice and prejudice, and bullying. “Knowledge saved my life,” said Altmann. “Learn all you can – nobody can take that away from you. And if you see injustice, stand up for that person and you can create a better world. I have all the reasons to hate. I lost my family and I lost my youth, but I don’t have hate inside me because hate hurts you more to carry it around.”
Janice Lubin-Kirschner, Senior Director at JCY-Westchester Community Partners, said, “The Holocaust occurred because a society was collectively influenced through propaganda to commit genocide against eleven million people, six million of whom were Jews, five million of whom were considered unacceptable because they did not fit Hitler’s Aryan ideal. We have this program to teach Yonkers students to think independently by being upstanders and not bystanders, even if it is difficult to do. This is the last generation who will be able to hear directly from a survivor of the Holocaust. We want the students to hear their story, and carry their wisdom forward in their lives so that this type of atrocity will never happen again.
I came to hear Judy Altmann’s story three years ago. This year I returned with my high school age daughter, because I wanted her to hear first hand, what happened from a Holocaust survivor. I have never forgotten Ms. Altmann’s courage, including her ability to re tell her story again and again.
And I would encourage everyone to listen to the stories of Holocaust survivors and World War II Veterans who rescued those left alive from concentration camps before its too late.
God bless you Judy Altmann and happy Passover.
