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Behind every name a story.

Behind Every Name a Story consists of essays describing survivors’ experiences during the Holocaust, written by survivors or their families. We encourage all survivors to share their unique experiences to ensure their preservation for future generations.

The essays, accompanying photographs, and other materials, including submissions that we are unable to feature on our website, will become a permanent part of the Museum’s records.

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Jakob Blankitny

Jakob Blankitny

It was winter and the cold burned us; all the camp was flooded and muddy. They took our winter clothes and in exchange gave us light clothes that looked like striped pajamas.

Rosa Marie Burger

Rosa Marie Burger

I saw girls weeping—my friends, girls I had grown up with. Their bundles were placed in the last car and the people were herded onto the train. We lived not far from Dachau.

Irene (Blász) Csillag

Irene (Blász) Csillag

I was born in 1925 in Satu Mare, which was in Romania at that time but in 1940 became part of Hungary. We were four in our family: my mother, father, and one sister, Olga, who also survived and is still living.

Miriam (Rot) Eshel

Miriam (Rot) Eshel

The man photographed us and after a few days he brought the picture … My mother said to us: “We will bury the picture.”

Haya Friedman

Haya Friedman

Marius was the only “humane” being I met during the terrible days of deportation. On a snowy November day in 1944 at Auschwitz ( I was 19 years old), they called us together and crammed us again into railcars, 80 girls in a railcar that was meant for eight horses and sent us away—we didn’t know where, of course.

Manya Friedman

Manya Friedman

I had little confidence when I started. My hands were so shaky I could barely read my own writing. As I started writing, I was given confidence, support, and encouragement. If I can do this, then you can too.

Manya’s Memory Project Manya’s biography

Mara Ginic

My throat was parched, the wind blew my hair in my face and obstructed my vision. My knees buckled and the glacier never seemed to end.

Andrew Glass

Andrew Glass

Finding a way to remain in the United States as an illegal alien proved to be one heck of a sweet bargain.

Sima Gleichgevicht-Wasser

Sima Gleichgevicht-Wasser

Sima could easily pass as a non-Jewish Pole because she had a light complexion and was blonde, but to be able to live as a Pole, she needed a Kennkarte (identification card), and to get a Kennkarte she needed a Polish birth certificate. 

Green and Hoffer Families

Green and Hoffer Families

My mother and aunt worked for the Russians until my mother was smuggled out of Poland to the American Zone in Germany where she lived in a displaced persons camp, Feldafing, and married my father on October 16, 1946.

Grossman Family

Grossman Family

Rivka (née Kleinman) Grossman and Mordechai Gimpel Grossman were our parents. Our family lived in the bucolic village of Mad in northeastern Hungary, in the wine country near the Carpathian Mountains—about 100 kilometers north of Debrecen.

Miroslav (Fred) Grunwald

Miroslav (Fred) Grunwald

As the German army pushed southward, taking over from the Italians, all occupied Adriatic territory, I was suddenly again on the run and in hiding. But this time I was not so lucky.

Marian Kalwary

In normal circumstances, time goes fast, but in the ghetto, it dragged exceedingly long. Every day passed very slowly, as if to spite us.

Pieter (Peter) Kohnstam

Pieter (Peter) Kohnstam

In the morning of July 6, 1942, Anne Frank came to say good-bye to us. The Franks were about to go into hiding in their secret annex. It was a sad and difficult parting for everyone.

Joseph Moses Lang

Joseph Moses Lang

It began in May 1944 when my family and I were told to pack whatever we could carry and we were placed, along with many others, in an old factory building in Targu Muresh, Romania.

Marcel Lob

When Marcel got the news of her deportation, he knew that he would never see his mother again—the person he adored beyond anyone else. It was with a broken body and a broken heart that he arrived in Paris.

Ester Lupyan

Ester Lupyan

In the memories of those who lived through the occupation, the recollection of the existence and survival in the ghetto is still frightening. I will only say that out of our family, my mother and I were the only ones to survive. 

Pola (née Gorzkowska) Nikodemska

Pola (née Gorzkowska) Nikodemska

My family didn’t hate any race or any human being. Our religion tells us, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” It was the most natural thing to help another person who needed help.

Heinz Raphael

Heinz Raphael

The Gestapo visited us in the morning. They knew my father from his visits as Seelsorger  (minister) to the Jews in the local prison. 

Barbara Rebhun

Barbara Rebhun

I was found in either an empty train wagon, or close to the rail station, by a Red Cross attendant in the little town of Milanówek, about 20 kilometers from Warsaw.

Erna Rubin

After three weeks in the ghetto of Czernowitz, we were sent to the camps in Transnistria for three terrible years of poverty, hunger, typhus, and fear for the future. We had hope in our hearts and only that kept us alive.

Irene Safran

Irene Safran

My journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau began on May 19, 1944, when I boarded the train with my parents, three younger sisters, and two brothers.

Simon Family

Simon Family

While in Westerbork, Selma Simon wrote to her daughters, Ruth and Hilda in England. The last letter was written four or five days before they were deported to Poland in which, sadly, Selma said, “We hope to see you soon.”

Naki Touron-Fais

Naki Touron-Fais

In the car I tried to be excited about finally ending this ordeal, but I felt I was dying from agony and fear. I was trying to find a way out. If we went to Lehonia, it would be the end of us. Nobody knew us there. After a while, I asked, “Where are we going?”

Agnes Gertrude Wohl

Agnes Gertrude Wohl

My name is Agnes Gertrude Wohl (maiden name Mendelovits), born in Budapest, Hungary, on March 3, 1933.

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Survivor Reflections and Testimonies

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Join us right now to watch a live interview with a survivor, followed by a question-and-answer session.

Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust

University of Illinois Medical Center Chicago

This article is only available in the PDF format. Download the PDF to view the article, as well as its associated figures and tables.

This book delineates the social setting and the process of organizing the extermination of millions according to National Socialist philosophy. As Hamburg notes in his foreword, the "level of sophistication in modern organization and technology" that the Germans brought to this work was unique—railway schedules, euphemisms for murder, classifications of Gypsies, Jews, Poles, and political prisoners, the architectural design and chemistry of mass murder. Also detailed are the use of inmates as cards for political negotiation and the resistance of some Italian Fascists and German clergymen.

There is a section on the victims, telling how survivors coped in the camps and afterwards, and about the psychotherapy of survivors and what happens to their children. A general model of stress and coping under extreme conditions is developed by Benner, Roskies, and Lazarus.

A final section deals with the perpetrators. There are diaries and autobiographical material from guards and prominent Nazis, as

Bernstein NR. Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust. JAMA. 1982;247(22):3138. doi:10.1001/jama.1982.03320470078043

Download citation file:

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