Our Stories

Our Federation has long received requests for interviews with Child Survivors (including Hidden Children and Kind ertransport Children). Holocaust education, the creation of Speakers’ Bureaus, and the telling of our stories, are part of our reason for being as an organization.  We are able to have students and other interested parties contact and interview Child Survivors directly. The segments of stories you are reading on this page are only part of the larger stories but they give you an idea of who this Child Survivor is. At this stage, for reasons of privacy, the identity of the survivor is anonymous, only known by the first name of the survivor.

If you wish to contact the survivor in person, please email us with some information about yourself, who you are, where you come from, the purpose of the interview, how it will be used, etc.

• Book: Our Memories 2012

  We are pleased to be able to share R. Gabriele Silten's book, Our Memories 2012.  Our Memories is a book of poems, memoirs, and other documents submitted by child survivors and their families for the 2012 Cleveland Conference.  Gabriele has announced...

• Steve T.

  MORE FROM A WANDERER I was born in Vienna, Austria on January 8, 1932. I was thus six years old at the time of the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Germany). We left Vienna on an overnight train to Venice from S?dbahnhof (South Station) at 10 P.M....

• Marcelle B.

  My parents were originally from a small town near the larger city of Lodz, in Poland. They came to live in Paris right after their marriage in 1930, and I was born there in August of 1931. Ours was a large family. My mother and father were cousins and...

• Ilana D.

  My parents were born in Germany and fled after Hitler’s rise. Many of the members of their extended family managed to reach safe havens between 1933 and 1939 when the war actually started. This was the pattern of a great part of German Jewry. Thus I ...

• Helen B.

  I am a child survivor of the Holocaust. Even though I am no longer a child at this time, I was a child when I lived through the Holocaust. Before the war, I lived in Brussels, Belgium with my family. I enjoyed a culturally rich orthodox Jewish family ...

• Floris K.

  In July 1942, I was eight years old and living in occupied Belgium. The Germans had just begun to round up Jews and deport them so it became imperative for my family to go into hiding. Suddenly I found myself in a strange place away from home, away ...

• Miryam L.

  A TALE OF TEREZIN (also known as Theresienstadt) Interview with My Mother, Miryam L., Child Survivor of Concentration Camp As Told To Esther V. L., 1999 SOME BACKGROUND NOTES: The place of my mother’s Birth, CHUST, is a small town in the pr...

• Rudolph J.

  S.S. St. Louis experience I was born on May 11, 1933. After the promulgation of the Nurnberg laws in 1935, my parents decided there was no future for them or their in children in Nazi Germany and applied for a U.S. immigration quota number. It would b...

• Goldie S.

  Goldie survived the Auschwitz camp. Some questions and answers: #1 How long did you stay in Auschwitz? Five and 1/2 months. Went in with my mother and 2 sisters, was 13 1/2 years old when war ended. #2 What was your daily schelude? Did it v...

• Richard V.

  I was born in Warsaw Poland and I lived there until 1939. In that year, after Germans occupied Poland, my parents and I managed to get across the border to the eastern part of Poland that was occupied by Russia. Due to various government restrictions w...

• Gerda S.

  I was born in Przemysl, Poland, but after the Russians occupied Eastern Poland, we moved in to Lwow, to avoid being sent to camps in Russia. My father was a business man and was considered "an enemy of the state". The Germans occupied our area in Ju...

• Malka B.

  My parents were originally from a small town near the larger city of Lodz, in Poland. They came to live in Paris right after their marriage in 1930, and I was born there in August of 1931. Ours was a large family. My mother and father were cousins and ...

• Rene G.

  I was born in Luxembourg, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, 25 March 1934. My parents had immigrated from Western Poland. In 1940, after the German invasion of the Benelux countries, we moved to Brussels, where I began my primary education, in Flemish. But as...

• Henry O.

    Henry O   I was born in Amsterdam in April, 1940, a month before the German invasion of  the Netherlands (10th May 1940). My father was born in Krakow, now Poland.   He had moved to Vienna , Austria, at the age of 14.  He moved to Am...

• Aaron E.

  Aaron E. Aaron lives in Chicago, Illinois, USA Good Afternoon, Honorable Mayor, (Mrs. Daley,) Distinguished guests, Fellow Survivors (by whose presence I am truly humbled), Students, Ladies and Gentleman The questions ladies and gentlemen is why do ...