A Holocaust Survivor Tells of Auschwitz at 18 and, Again, at 90

[n2doc]

"Time does not help. It only deepens the feeling that something is missing. One simply learns to live with such trauma," said Eva Fahidi.


BUDAPEST — HIGH above the hubbub of Budapest’s main tourist street, Eva Fahidi flits, birdlike, around her warm apartment, lined with books and plants. The setting is cozy, and the hostess and narrator, at 90, a lingeringly beautiful charmer. So the contrast with the Holocaust horror she is describing is all the more complete.

When she was 18, she was, as she put it, “ripped off the school bench to be deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau,” one of an estimated 437,000 Hungarian Jews rounded up outside Budapest and dispatched to death camps in just 57 days in 1944.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, she recalled, “was not ready. It was too fast. The gas chambers were big enough that people could still be suffocated to death. But the crematories could not manage. So corpses were being burned on open fires.”

“Really, at the very first moment you knew something was wrong. It was the huge stench of burning corpses — only we didn’t know.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/world/europe/a-holocaust-survivor-tells-of-auschwitz-at-18-and-again-at-90.html

[840high]

1. k/r

[NBachers]

2. The entire article is well worth reading.

[Behind the Aegis]

3. As more are starting to pass away, I hope they come forward with their stories.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

4. yes.

I had relatives I never knew who died in the camps. Not sure which camp.