Holocaust Survivors
My whole life I've always had two major passions, photography and Judaism. I sought to find a way to combine these two passions of mine and began my Holocaust survivor project. These survivors were very eager to be photographed and even more excited that someone had taken an interest in the topic, especially someone so young. Click through each image to learn their names and read the stories of those who shared.
Holocaust survivor Joeseph Alexander was born in 1922 in Kowol, Poland. Shortly after the Nazi invasion in 1939, Joseph and his family were forced to leave everything behind and be transported into a ghetto. After being seperated from his family in an escape attempt, Joseph was caught and imprisoned in over 13 concentration camps throughout the war, including Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was liberated by American troops at Dachau in 1945. He immigrated to the United States in 1949 where he married and had two children
Erika Jacoby. Erika Jacoby was born in Hungary in 1928. When Germany occupied Hungary on March 19th, 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz with her mother. She was only 16 when she arrived there. She was among the youngest that escaped the selection of Dr. Mengele and together with her mother, who was among the oldest, she endured and outlasted the atrocities and deprivations of the Nazi persecutors. She described how the teachings and values that she absorbed and incorporated into her life in her home helped her survive Auschwitz and the other concentration camps. She is painfully disappointed in the behavior of her fellow human beings, but never lost her faith in G-d. She took it upon herself the enormous responsibility for her mother's survival and the impact of that on their relationship after the war. She is a remarkable account of one person's resiliency, ability to cope with adversity and survive not only physically but also spiritually. She has gone back to Auschwitz three times since to express her anger.
Mrs. Feldman Icikson was born in Chelm, Poland in 1935. After the German invasion in 1939, her family was sent to several different cities in Ukraine and White Russia, including Opalin, Lebivne, and Giesen. At this time, her father and uncle were arrested by the authorities and shipped to a prison in Asino, Siberia. Esther, along with her mother and two sisters, was sent farther east to Sibiryak. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 her father and uncle were released under a general amnesty. The family was reunited in Asino after Esther's mother took the family back to Asino via a home-built raft. At the end of 1942, the family was resettled in Kyrgyzstan, where they remained until the end of the war in 1945. Following the end of the war, the family returned to Chelm and then moved on to a DP camp in Ulm, Germany. From there they made their way to Israel, where they lived in Lut. Esther emigrated to the United States in 1958.
Bella Kaczor. It wasn't until 1994 that Bella Kaczor could speak about, or accept her past. Bella was born on December 17, 1928, in former Czechoslovakia. Bella was 16 when Hungarian police displaced her and her family to different ghettos, and after six weeks, brought them to Auschwitz. Once off the train at Auschwitz, a young man told her to lie about her age and say she was actually 20. “We walked in a line past the head of Auschwitz. To the left were the gas chambers; to the right, you came out alive. When he asked me my age, I went to the right, because it was decided I was capable of work. My mother and two younger sisters went to the gas chambers.'' Conditions in the barracks were terrible. There were 32 barracks and in each barrack a thousand girls. “If we were sleeping, there'd be six or seven girls in a line on one bunk bed. If one wanted to turn over, the whole row had to turn over.'' Bella was never tattooed with an identification number, so she was always unsure of whether she'd be alive the next day. Eventually, Bella was taken back to Czechoslovakia with 600 other girls to work in a bomb factory. She worked there until April 1945. In May of that year, German soldiers came to march the girls to Terezienstadt, a concentration camp near Prague. “They took us there to gas us. On the morning of May 8th, Russian people came up to us on horses, and we knew we were liberated.” Bella stayed at the liberated camp, where she found her brother was alive. While moving in and out of hospitals to be treated for poisoning from the bombs, she also found that two of her sisters had survived. After the treatments were over, Bella went back to her home in Czechoslovakia, only to find all the houses boarded up. She moved to a displaced person camp, where she met her husband, who had lost six siblings to the Holocaust. After three weeks, they married and moved to Israel, at Bella’s request. In 1958, she moved with her husband and two sons to New York so Bella could be closer to her emigrated sister. After her husband retired in 1977, the family moved to California.
Eva Trenk
Max Wozniak
Claire Roth
Serena Ruben
Ruth Greenstein
Gertrude Frischer
Eva Lax
Miriam Mazur
Nysan Zysman
George Bran
Jehuda Vardi