My family was farmers.  We had animals and fruit trees.  My father used to make Slivovitz (a strong brandy made from plums).  My father was in the Czech army, had a limp.  I loved my mother very, very dearly.  When I was a young girl, I went to Budapest and learned to become a seamstress.

 

My mother was taken away from me at the train station and put on a cattle car.  I worked together with my sister in a German munitions factory finding the bullets that wouldn’t fire.  My sister had dysentery and fouled herself while she was working.  She was beaten to death on the spot with a rifle butt by a German Nazi guard.

 

I was in the ghetto of Mukacevo and in the concentration camps; Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Salzwedel, and was liberated by American soldiers at Buchenwald.  

 

When I arrived at Auschwitz, they took my clothes from me, they gave me one dress and they cut off my hair.  I was given a tattoo.  One held my arm, the other did the work.  Blood was all over.

 

I knew we were being liberated because I recognized the American flag from school.  I returned home in the hope of finding my family.  I found our home though was occupied by some local people from the village.  I found no one from my family.

 

I went to a Displaced Person’s (DP) camp called New Palestina outside of Salzburg, Austria.  

I met my husband, David Isaac Rosenberg in the DP camp; he was an Auschwitz survivor also.  We were married on June 25, 1946.  My son was born exactly one year later, June 25, 1947 in a hospital in Salzburg.

 

We emigrated to the United Stated in 1949 arriving in Boston.  We crossed the Atlantic on board a converted US Navy signal ship called the USS Flasher.  From there we went to New York briefly because I had friends there.  We finally settled in Chicago because that’s where my husband had family; they had sponsored us to come to the United States.  My daughter Ruchie was born in Chicago in 1949.

 

I worked as a seamstress in a couple of sweatshops.  My husband worked as a Mashgiach in a slaughterhouse.  He was fired because he was too strict in deciding what a kosher animal was and what was not.  He then swept floors for retail stores on Maxwell Street.  He finally went to work as a Shamas in a funeral parlor.  He did Taharos and sewed the Tachrichim.  He became an administrator there. 

 

My husband died of cancer at the age 46; I was 38 years old with two children.  I continued to work as a seamstress to feed my family along with my husband’s social security.

 

Zachor, remember. Never forget what we went through.