| Jewish Stories --> Stories --> Stories from Holocaust Survivor Cookbook --> Carol Wilner |
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Carol Wilner Columbia, MD. Recipe:
Chakchooka |
 Holocaust Survivor Cookbook Recipes your family will enjoy......Stories they will never forget |
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The town where I was born was made into a slave concentration camp where
only the strongest and fittest were allowed to remain. My father, who
had studied in Vienna and was fluent in German, became a interpreter for
the Germans. My mother dug ditches. At first we lived outside the camp, but it became increasingly dangerous. Every day Jews were gathered up and sent to death camps. When I was 18 months old it became evident that I could no longer survive on the outside so I was smuggled into the camp where my father's friends built a secret crawl space for me. I remained hidden from the time I was 18 months until I was four. I was not allowed to cry, and I remained hidden by myself for endless hours until someone could come down to check on me. At night I was taken down to be with my mother. I never smelled fresh air or felt the sun, and was not able to examine the world the way babies du. I am often asked, and I ask myself, how it was possible for a toddler to survive such confines and to understand that crying meant death. Somehow I understood, and under impossible conditions I remained hidden. My mother had a baby boy who was not so lucky. He was born in the camp and he was taken away to die on the day he was born because it was impossible to hide two children. My mother had to make the choice. When I was four we were liberated by the Russians and we lived in Poland for another two years. The conditions were terrible so my father decided to take the risk and have us smuggled over the border into Czechoslovakia, Austria, and finally into a displaced person's camp run by Americans in Germany. We took nothing with us but the clothes on our backs and whatever money my father had been able to save. The three week journey was difficult, arduous, and dangerous. Most of the survivors in the camp were preparing to go to Palestine. Like us, they had lost everything, but when Palestine became Israel it became their refuge and dream. But then, through the Red Cross, my father managed to find his nephew and niece who survived and come to America. They sent us papers, and we made the decision to come to America rather than Israel. We arrived in August, 1949 when I was 8 years old. |
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