4 | The Yellow Star

Kathy Preston was just a joyous little girl when the Holocaust tore through her golden childhood in Transylvania. In this unforgettable episode of Alive Again, Kathy recounts—in stunning detail—the moment her innocence ended, hiding in a barn as bayonets stabbed the straw just inches from her face. Miraculously, she survived. But this is more than a story of hiding and escape. Kathy’s story travels through persecution, displacement, and grief—but also healing, forgiveness, and the power of memory. She reflects on the woman who risked everything to save her life, on the trauma that shaped her worldview, and on the stubborn optimism that carries her forward. From being starved and hunted as a child, to building a joyful life with children and grandchildren, Kathy’s journey is a testament to resilience—and a reminder that surviving isn’t just about staying alive. It’s about choosing love over vengeance and passing that choice forward. And now, in her 80s, Kathy speaks to school children across the U.S. about the power of resistance, survival, and the importance of love over hate. 

“There are less and less people alive from the period I am from,” she tells us, “and the more people die, the less availability there is to connect with the past. I speak for the people who can’t speak for themselves.” 

Story producer: Nicholas Tecosky.

For more information about Kathy and her work and books, you can go to www.katipreston.com

Warning: This series contains graphic descriptions of trauma, violence, abuse, and other content that may not be suitable for certain listeners.

* If you have a transformative near-death experience to share, we’d love to hear your story. Please email us at [e-mail] 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psycopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
If you give in to a bully, you become a victim.
I'm not a victim. I'm a survivor and I'm going
to fight for this until I stop talking, because I
don't believe that we have to give up to evil.
The only way we can fight it is to resist it.
Ten percent of people are really nice and ten percent

(00:35):
are pretty shitty and nasty. Unfortunately, eighty percent are sheep.
It's a sheep who scare me. The sheep will allow
a dictator to rise. The sheep will stand by and
let Hitler do what he did, whereas a good person
might have to actually stand up and do something.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
Welcome to Alive Again a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people his lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories

(01:15):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener and discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Well, you know, basically, I come from Transylvania, which is
that little enclave between Hungary and Romania that keep changing ownership.
You know, I come from an unusual family because my
mother was a Catholic and my father was a jew.
My father had a very large Jewish family and my
mother was a staunch Catholic family. So you can imagine

(01:52):
how happy they were. But my parents didn't care. It
was a love match and you know, for the or
time they had together, they were very happy. For those days,
they were very well off. My mother was a dressmaker.
People used to you know, people used to buy dresses
not in her shop. They would buy a piece of

(02:14):
cloth and go and have it manufactured by a dressmaker.
My mother had forty girls working for her, so it
was a big business. And you know, we had everything
that you know, you could buy in those days. We
didn't have a car, but everything else. We had a telephone,
which most people didn't, and a beautiful apartment. My father
had a wholesale fish business. There was a river that

(02:38):
went through town and he had great, big crates of
live carp in the river which he would wholesale. And
I remember as a little girl. There was always a
carp swimming in our bath. My daddy was my hero.
He was tall, dark and handsome and always had a
white silk scarf, and he was very flamboyant, and I

(02:59):
mean think, I think today I would consider him over
the top. But he would burst into the room singing
opera at the top of his voice, and he would
pick me up and dance around with me and throw
me around. And my mother was a disciplinarian. She was
a hard working one that kept telling him off, Now,
behave yourself. That's no way to bring up a child,

(03:20):
you know, that sort of thing. But daddy and I
were very, very close. I adored him. My mother converted
to Judaism to please my father's family, but we never
did anything very much in terms of religion at home.
I remember my mother would light Campbell's on a Friday night.

(03:43):
She had a scarf and she would mutter things in
a foreign tongue, and I thought she was doing magic.
I wasn't quite sure what she was doing. I was
waiting for something to happen, you know. And that's about
the only Jewish religion I remember in the house. But
they always let me have a Christmas tree because I
love Christmas and they didn't want to deprive me. So
we had these tall, tall Christmas trees. We had very

(04:05):
tall ceilings, and you know, they used to have little
clips with real candles, and then there was candy on
the tree instead of decorations. There was lots of candy
and lots of tinsel and candles, and every Christmas we
had a fire. I still have a tree every Christmas,
but no more candles. Now it's now it's lights boring.

(04:27):
But there you go. In those days, in their sort
of naive I wouldn't call it snobbery, but their ambition
to bring up a lady. They decided that we had
to do what the very rich people did, and they
got me a governess from Austria who spoke beautiful German.
And she arrived, tall lady with a bun, and I

(04:48):
don't think she had any lips, because I don't remember
her smiling, as she had a sort of slash for
a mouth. And she was so strict. I had to
have heart boiled eggs under my armpits so I wouldn't
wave my arms the table. Never any elbows on the table.
And if you think you had to wash your hands
a lot during COVID, nothing compared to what this woman
made me do. She was one of these maniacs about

(05:11):
cleanliness next to godliness. You know, God forbid anybody should
should not wash every five minutes. Every five minutes, I
had to wash my hands, wash my face, and walking
in all weather because it's healthy, you know, healthy body,
healthy mind. Snow, sleet, rain, it doesn't matter. She would
drag me out and walk me. But you know, that

(05:34):
was her and there was nothing I could do about it.
She also wouldn't let me play with the children in
the street anymore. In those days, you used to run
outside and play until it got dark and then come in.
And she wouldn't let me do that because those kids
were not the right kids. They were not rich, you know.
I was only allowed to play with one little boy
who lived down the road. It was very cute. He

(05:56):
had curly blonde hair and big blue eyes. His name
was Ishtvan Stefan Ishtranko. It's his sort of nickname. You know.
We chase each other and catch each other, and every
time I caught him, I kissed him and he hated it,
and I loved it, and I learned to run really
fast because I loved that little boy and I tormented

(06:17):
him a lot. Then my parents decided to send me
to a Jewish kindergarten two mornings a week to let
me know something about my heritage. I don't remember much
about it. They told me that I was Jewish, and
I remember looking at my skin and looking at other

(06:39):
people in the street, and I couldn't see any difference.
I didn't really understand what it meant to be Jewish
because I looked the same, you know, I looked the
same as before, and I looked like other people. The
little boy was there too, Ishtuan was there, but unfortunately
he didn't make it. He never came home. Frequently I'm

(07:00):
asked by kids, how come Jews agreed to go to camps. Well,
it wasn't like that. It wasn't a sudden thing. It
was a slow erosion of our freedoms. They started taking
our rights away. First. Jews couldn't couldn't go to college anymore,
couldn't teach in a college, couldn't go to high school anymore,

(07:22):
couldn't even go to elementary school US it was a
Jewish school. Jewish doctors could no longer treat non Jews.
My first inkling of antisemitism was the fact that I
could no longer sit on my favorite park bench because
that wasn't a Jew bench. Jews had a separate bench
with a yellow stripe on it that said Jew, and

(07:43):
we were allowed to sit on that bench, but no
other benches. And I used to go to the park
with the nanny, and I used to go to the
swimming pool with my daddy, and none of that was
allowed anymore. No movie houses, no restaurants, no theaters. Jews
couldn't go anywhere. You know, we were complete lean ostracized.

(08:04):
Then the mood started changing, you know, there was all
this talk in the background, and kids pick up on things.
People started talking and started saying things like should maybe
we should leave what's happening. So and so isn't allowed
to go to college anymore, and so and so who's
a lawyer is no longer allowed to practice. And people

(08:26):
started to worry, and but we weren't that worried. The
Hungarian Jews were very assimilated. We were very faithful, patriotic Hungarians.
We loved the culture, we loved the language, loved the food.
We were Hungarians. We've been there for hundreds of years,
and nobody imagined that anything would happen to us. We

(08:47):
started hearing about concentration camps. We couldn't believe that something
like that could happen. Germany, the most cultured country in
the world, would not allow something like that to happen.
And anyway, we're Hungarians. I mean, come on, Hungarians, what
are they They're going to kill her own people who
are Hungarians. Then a new law came that no women

(09:09):
under the age of forty five could work in a
Jewish home, so a lot of the girls who worked
for my mother were gone. And then my mother said
to me, you know, I have a present for you.
And she brought out this beautiful yellow star made of
gold material and she sewed it onto my coat. I
remember it was a little blue coat. And she says,
let's go get some pastries. And she's holding my hand

(09:32):
and we're going down the street and I'm sort of
hopping alongside her, and a man comes opposite and he
looks at me, and I look up at him, sort
of expecting a nice compliment about my new star, and
he spits in my face and the spit runs down

(09:52):
my cheek onto my star, and I say to my mother,
he hates stars, never thinking it's me. And my mother
would normally be very feisty, would take me by the
hand and yell at the man. Doesn't do anything. She
grabs me and she starts dragging me home. She says,
we're going home. We're going home. I'll tell you when

(10:13):
we get there. And I say, but but but the man.
She says, no, no, no, no, you don't understand. When
we get home, I'll explain. And we got home and
she says, no, darling, it's not it's not the star.
It's you. He hates. And I said, but why what
have I done? She says, you're a Jew? And I said, well,
if I didn't have this, would he know I'm a Jew?
And she says probably not. I said, so let's take

(10:36):
it off. She says, no, it's the law. You have
to have it. I had to wear the star if
I went outside. It was the law. I was not
allowed not to have it. Now you see, the Hungarians
didn't consider my mother Jewish because she wasn't Jewish by blood.
You were only Jewish by blood, not by not by religion.

(10:59):
So because my mother was although she was a convert.
She was not considered the Jew I was, so I
was supposed to wear the yellow star. She didn't have to.
And at this point, the Hungarian authorities were very sneaky,
and they had everybody go to the local police station
and register. They wanted to know where everybody lived so

(11:19):
they could protect us, you know, that's what they said.
And like good citizens, everybody went to the police station
and registered with them, telling them where we all lived
so they could find us easily, no problem. And they
started to build a ghetto. Now our town had one

(11:42):
hundred thousand people, thirty thousand were Jews, a third of
the town, which was a big, big amount, and they
decided to squeeze thirty thousand people into like three blocks,
you know, And there were like fifteen twenty people to
a room, and they were all in there waiting to
be taken somewhere, waiting for something to happen, and it

(12:05):
was getting very tight. And my mother wouldn't let me
go to the ghetto because she thought they wouldn't notice
one little girl missing. But my father had to go,
and I remember them saying goodbye. My mother and my
father were holding each other sobbing, and you know, I
kind of wormed my way between them because I wanted
to be part of everything. And I cried too, but

(12:25):
I wasn't that sad because I thought that it would
go on a business trip and bring presents like he
always did. And then he left. He had a coat
and a hat and a little bag and he went.
And my mother was inconsolable. She was sobbing and crying
and yelling, and oh, she was in a terrible state.

(12:48):
And then suddenly there was a lot of noise and
I ran to the window because our apartment was up
one floor, and I looked down at the street, and
the street was covered in vehicles and trot and there
were soldiers everywhere in green uniforms to back feathers in
their hats, and they were dragging people out of their houses.

(13:10):
They knew where every Jew lived, of course, they had
a list, and they all went from house to house
systematically dragging people out and shoving them onto these vehicles,
and it was very brutal. People were stumbling and falling
and getting kicked and getting whipped and getting prodded, and
suddenly everybody was taken away and they were all gone.

(13:31):
And then there was silence and then my mother came
and she says, you're not allowed to be seen downstairs.
You have to hide, and so she drags me upstairs,
and she says, you're not allowed to run in the
apartment because the neighbors downstairs can hear your footsteps, and

(13:52):
you can't play with your ball, and you have to
hide under the bed if anybody comes, and you can't
go near the window. And I hated it. It was like,
you know, it was like being a prisoner. When people
bought food in those days that weren't supermarkets, we used
to go to the market once a week there was
a big market, and the rest of the time the

(14:13):
farmers would come into town with a horse and carriage
and bring their produce and ring a bell and yell
out what they had. And a young woman used to
bring our milk. She had a horse and the carriage
and she had big vats of milk at the back
of the carriage, and we would come downstairs and she'd
measure out the milk. She had been an orphan, and

(14:33):
my mother heard that she was an orphan and she
was poor. She made her a wedding dress. And it's
this dress that saved my life. I was really saved
by a wedding dress, because the girl never forgot and
she heard the rounding up the Jews, and knowing my
mother married a Jew, which was quite a scandal, she
came and she said, I would like to help you.

(14:55):
You've been so good to me. Where is your little girl?
And my mother says, I'm hiding her. She said, no, no, no, no,
no'll give her to me. I'll take her to my farm.
She'll be much safer there. And my mother came to
me and she says, do you want to go to
the farm. Her name was Elizabeth the girl, And I said, oh, yes,
I wanted to go to the farm. I thought there'll
be puppies and kittens and children to play with them.

(15:18):
I hopped up on her carriage and there was a
sort of a wooden bench. She will let me hold
the reins part of the way, and off I went.
I was close to five years old by this time,
and I was so proud of myself. I was having
an adventure. Here. To this day, I can't understand how
my mother had the courage to hand over her only

(15:39):
spoiled child to this woman she hardly knew, and say,
save my daughter. I don't think I could do it,
and she just let me go. She let me go.
What courage it took. I don't know whether it was
despair or courage or the combination thereof, but I really
thank god she did that, or I wouldn't be here.

(16:00):
It was getting dark, and we got to her farm
side of a hill. Her house was halfway up the hill.
She had a vineyard there as well, and then she
had cows and pigs and things, and then her through
the gate. There was like a big gate made of
bricks and wood, and through the gate to the left
was a small barn with two stalls, one for the

(16:22):
horse and one for the cow, and with sort of
a rickety staircase going up. And she takes me out
of the cart and she says, you're staying here. I said,
what do you mean I'm staying here? I want to
go to your house. She says, no, no, no, you
don't understand there. You can't go to my house because
people want to kill you. I looked at her, and
you know, this idea of death is very alien. I mean,

(16:45):
I know I'm going to die and my mom eighty five,
but I never think of death. You know, other people die.
I don't have time for that sort of thing. Well
the death, Well, who's going to kill me? Why would
they kill me? And I was arguing with her and
having a tantruman, you know, tossing my head and banging around, saying,
I don't want to stay in this smelly barn. I
hated here. I want to go home to my mommy

(17:06):
and my daddy. I hated it smell as I hated.
And she says, no, my dear, you have to stay here.
And she took me upstairs into this little dingy barn.
It was full of hay. People used to throw hay
up with a fork, not with the with the there
were no hay bales. And she takes me and she
makes me a bed with some blankets, and she says,

(17:27):
you have to stay here and I'll be back in
the morning. She goes and she leaves me, and it's
getting dark and there's rustling in the hay, and there's
big black spiders everywhere, big furry spiders, and I'm terrified,
and it's getting darker and darker, and there's no electricity,
and I remember crying myself to sleep. You can get

(17:51):
used to things after a while. I stopped crying, and
I even managed to amuse myself somehow. I was in
this barn for three months, totally alone. Imagine your daughter
being alone in a barn. And I raised four sons.
I don't think I've kept them quiet more than five minutes.
I was quiet for three months in this barn, and

(18:12):
I even got used to living alone. I mean, I
had no toys because she was afraid of having toys
in the in the barn in case somebody found it.
But I made dolls out of the hay and the straw.
And I even made friends with the spiders. I mean
they were not bad spiders, they were just big and ugly.
But I caught one and I tied a string to

(18:33):
his leg, and now I had a bat. I called
him Max, and I was very happy with Max, Max
the spider. Then the leg came off, and then he
scuttled off somewhere, and I felt so guilty. I thought
I maimed Max. You know, I'm still looking for Max
this day. Very early one morning, I hear a commotion

(19:01):
and I look through the cracks of the barn and
there are three soldiers again in those green uniforms with
the black feathers and they're slapping this poor Elizabeth around.
They have big guns and bayonets and they're they're hitting her.
They said, where's the jew. We have information you're hiding
a jew here. We want the jew. Where's the jew?

(19:21):
And she says, there's no jew. She's crying. They said,
no jew. Go out to my house and have a look.
There's no jew here. So they run up to her
house and they ransack it because they're angry that there's
nobody there, and they're breaking things and they throw furniture
through the window and they break all her dishes, and
they're furious because they can't find the jew. And they

(19:42):
start running past the barn to get into their vehicle
until one of them says, wait a minute, ah, let's
look in the barn. Maybe there's a jew in the barn.
And they start coming up these stairs. And I scooched
under the hay and I made my so really really
very small, and I sort of curled up and I

(20:05):
held my breath, but my heart was beating so loud.
I was afraid they could hear it. It sounded like
a drum, you know. And I tried to quiet my heart,
and it was very difficult, and I had my eyes
shut tight, because when you're scared, you think if you
don't look at them, they don't see you. And they
kept coming closer and closer, and they were using the
bayonets to rifle through the hay and stab the hay,

(20:28):
and they got closer and closer, and then I hear
a thumb. Then I open an eye and there's a
big black boot next to my face and the bayonet
comes down one inch from this cheek and he stabs
it really hard in the wood and then he pulls
it out. I still remember the noise it made as

(20:50):
it came out of the wood, and I think that's
when I realized what it means to die. And I think,
really my childhood ended that day, because my golden childhood
was gone. I remember Elizabeth came and she says, it's okay,
they're gone. They didn't find you. You're fine. I couldn't
stand up, I couldn't eat, I couldn't do anything for

(21:12):
a whole day. My feet wouldn't hold me up. I
was so terrified. And then my poor mother was arrested
because they found out that I was on the list.
But I wasn't in the ghetto. Somebody told them and
she was imprisoned for two days at the local gendarmerie,

(21:33):
you know, and they tortured her. And she never told
me what they did to her because she said it
was far too humiliating. It must have been gang rape
or something. She was a pretty young woman. She managed
to bribe one of the soldiers to take her home.
She said she had some gold coins and she would
let him have the gold coins if he let her go.

(21:54):
And she even managed to smuggle my father out of
the ghetto, and he was going to walk across the
room other border was close by and escape, and he
told my mother that before he went to Romania, he
had to come and see me. He said, I'm not
leaving without saying goodbye to the child because she depends
on me and we're so close. I want her to

(22:15):
know that I'm coming back as a father. You know
what he meant, you know, he wanted to say goodbye.
He wanted to explain to me, and my mother kept
asking him not to, but he wouldn't listen. And he
came walking to the farm late at night, and he
got to the farm at midnight and there was someone
behind the gate waiting for him, and they arrested him

(22:35):
and he was on the first transport out of town
to Auschwitz. And then one day my mother came and
she was so happy. She says, the war started. Can
you imagine being happy about the war starting. And she says,
we're going home. You can come home to our apartment.
And she says, the Russians are going to come and

(22:56):
they'll be fine, and Daddy will come home. And we all, well,
we can go home now. And we said goodbye to
Elizabeth and she was waving a handkerchief at the end
of her driveway, and she and my mother were crying,
but I wasn't crying. I was so happy to be
going home. And we went home to our apartment. But
there were bombs every hour. There was an air raid.

(23:17):
You know, these horrible noises, that horrible we sound, you know,
it's a horrible sound. And the air raids were almost
every hour, and eventually we even stopped going into the
cellar because there was no point. I mean that you
couldn't really escape even if you if you were in
the cellar, if you had a hit, the house would fall.

(23:39):
And there was the house three buildings of where a
house was hit, and it must have been a gambling casino,
because I remember it was raining playing cards. The whole
street was covered in playing cards. I never forget that
it was raining playing cards. We were so hungry. There
was no fuel, there was no food, there was no

(23:59):
ill tricity in it was cold, and we were very,
very miserable, and we were very hungry. And I remember
looking out the window and seeing a horse in the
carriage go past the house. And suddenly the horse stumbled
and fell right in front of our front door, and
the guy got out of the cart and starts kicking

(24:21):
the animal, but it's definitely dead, so he unhitches the
cart and pulls it away and leaves the carcass there.
And within minutes windows and doors open. People run out
with dishes and knives and start dismembering this dead horse.
And it was cold, and I remember they pulled the
hide off. There was steam coming out, and within an
hour there was nothing left of this horse except the hide,

(24:44):
a few hoofs, and a few guts. Everything was taken
away to be eaten, even the bones. We made soup
and we ate this horse. And you know, the whole
block of apartments that's how it survived that whole time
we ate this one poor dead horse. Hunger is not like, well,

(25:05):
you know, I haven't had anything to eat for a
few days. Hunger becomes an obsession. All you can think
about is food. You look in rawers to see if
somebody forgot a cookie or a piece of bread, and
all you can think about is food, foods, And your
head hurts, and your light headed, and your breast smells,
and your stomach hurts, and you can hardly stand up,

(25:25):
and all you can all you can think is food, food, food.
I no longer look at food as food. I think
of it as something much much bigger than that. You know,
it's it's life. You respect it, and you don't throw
it away. You cherish it. And the same goes for water,
because we didn't have water either. I remember they stopped bombing,

(25:50):
and then the Russians started coming across the frozen river,
which we could see from our window. They were coming
down the frozen embankment, linking arms, singing across the frozen river,
up on this embankment and being machine gunned, and they
were coming in waves and waves and waves and dying
in waves. They must have been drunk. Nobody's that brave,

(26:13):
and they were singing and coming, and there were so
many of them, hundreds of them being mowed down. And
eventually there were so many corpses in front of our
house you couldn't see the river anymore. And suddenly we
were on the Russian occupation. Well, they were not warm
and fuzzy, like my mother said, not at all. They

(26:34):
were raping and robbing, and they were very brutal. And
my mother and some of the women were hiding in
a false room that she built, and they were terrified,
you know, they were terrified. They couldn't go out because
they were being molested and raped and killed. And so

(26:54):
my mother at this point decided to take matters in
her hand, because you know, somebody had to do something,
and she decided to go and visit the local commander.
But she couldn't go out looking the way she did
because she was young and pretty. So she made herself
look old. She put on an old gray dress and
put a pillow under the dress on her back to
make herself look like she had a hunchback, and she

(27:15):
put on an old scarf, and she blackened her teeth,
and she drew lines on her face. She put on
an old scarf and an old cane and pretended to
be a very old woman, and she walked very carefully
to the local commander. To her surprise, the local commander

(27:38):
was a young woman. By this time, the Russians lost
so many people in the war that they were promoting
young women and young men to high positions. And to
my mother's surprise, this woman was a young pretty woman.
And through the interpreter, she said to her, and come
to my house. I'm a dressmaker. I'll make your lovely dress.
This uniform doesn't do it for you. It's not pretty,

(28:00):
but I can make you look very nice. And the
woman came, and my mother unhooked a drape from one
of the windows and put it on her. And suddenly,
oh my god, this woman was delighted. And she brought
some other soldier girls Russian once and suddenly we had food.
We had lots of food. We had a chicken and
bread and butter, even some chocolate. And we all got

(28:23):
very ill, because when you've been starving, you're not supposed
to eat. We almost died just eating. We couldn't stop eating,
because when you haven't eaten for a long time, all
you want to do is eat everything you can see,
and we got very sick. But eventually it all calmed
down and we started to eat normally, but we still
couldn't go out. So my mother said to the Russians, listen,

(28:45):
can you possibly give us a guard? So they gave
us two guards. Two people came. One of them was
called Evan. He was a tall kid, can't have been
more than seventeen tall, skinny, blonde kid. He was a
captain by this time, and his psychic was an elderly
gentleman who played the accordion them. And these two were

(29:06):
constantly drunk, constantly drunk. They drank anything they could lay
their hands. And they arrived with big bottles of vodka,
and then they proceeded to drink my mother's cologne and
some methylated spirits they found in the kitchen. They drank that.
But they were they were happy drunks. You know, there's
two kinds of drunks. These guys were happy drunks, and

(29:26):
I loved them. They were great fun for me because
all they did was they was They were very unruly.
They were taking potshots at the moldings on the wall.
They burnt our antique furniture for heat. My mother disapproved,
but I was very happy with them. They they were
very nice to me. Anyway, One day I got sick
and then Ivan brought me a gift, and I remember

(29:50):
lying there in bed. I had a sore throat or something,
had a high fever, and he gave me the sparcel
in white paper and I opened it up and it
was like the rising sun. It was an orange. I
had never seen an orange before because people didn't import food,
and I read about them in books. I knew about oranges,
but I hadn't seen one. And that wonderful smell it

(30:12):
had it was magical. And then my mother opened it
up and gave me some and she candied the rest.
And I could only eat it when I was sick,
and I wanted to be sick all the time so
I could eat the orange. And to this day there's
always an orange in my house. It's my security blanket.
You have no idea what an orange meant to a

(30:32):
child who had been starving. It was magical. And then
for some reason, the Russians left the town. The garrison
was moved out, and life started returning to normal, but
it wasn't very nice. It was kind of sad, and
my mother had very little business. We were waiting for

(30:53):
something to happen, and we heard all about concentration camps,
but we didn't believe it. We thought it was Communist
proper guns, because we couldn't believe the German, in the
most cultured country in the world, would allow hitler. You know, Nah,
we didn't believe it. She thought the Jews were just
taken to a work camp. And then she comes and
she says, listen, there's three trains coming back from those

(31:16):
work camps, and daddy's going to come home. And she
got me all dressed up, and she washed my hair
and she did her her hair up, and we went
all dressed up. We went to the railway station. We're
standing on the platform holding up a picture of my father,
like this, have you seen this man? Have you seen
this man? Have you seen this man? We're standing there

(31:39):
holding the picture, and the train empties and there's no daddy.
So we go home crying, and my mom says, well,
he'll be on the next train. He's coming back. Don't worry,
he'll be back. So we went back the next day
holding up the picture, waiting for daddy, and people start

(32:03):
coming off the train, and they scare me because they
don't look human. They are dressed in rags and they
have no hair, and they have swords all over, and
they smell bad, and they don't walk. They shuffle. And
my mother starts gathering these people and bringing them to
our house and washing them and giving them clothes, her
clothes to the women. And my father's close to the men.

(32:27):
And these people are sitting around in our house telling
us horrible stories. And I didn't know what to think.
And then we went back on the third day, the
third train, and we're holding up the picture and waiting
for Daddy. Then the man comes up to my mother
and says, don't wait for him. He's dead. She says,

(32:54):
what do you mean he's dead? Well, I saw his body,
She says, well, what happened? Was he sick? I don't know.
I saw his body. I can tell you he's dead.
Don't wait for him. She doesn't want to believe it,
but she takes this poor man home and she says
to him, how do you know who I am? Who
are you? And he says, don't you recognize me? He

(33:17):
was a very close friend of my parents, but he
was in such bad shape. He was beaten so hard
that my mother didn't recognize him. He used to own
a coffeehouse with a hotel attached where my parents used
to play cards every Sunday night. And he was also
a violinist, and they broke all his fingers, so he

(33:37):
had hands like claws. Really scared me, and eventually, when
I was about nine, he told me how my father died.
My father and another man stole a piece of bread
in the camp they were starving, and they were found out.
So the commander decided to make an example of these

(33:59):
two men and took them to the front of the
big field where the prisoners used to have to line
up every morning to be counted, and they it was cold.
They stripped these two men and they beat them with
iron bars, breaking most of their bones, and put each
of them in a dog kennel in this field and
left them there to die in front of these people

(34:19):
as an example. And it took my father's two days
and the night to die in agony. When I heard this,
I became completely obsessed with violence and hatred. All I
wanted to do was kill someone. I was a kid,
but I was reading books about how to stab, how

(34:40):
to poison, how to suffocate. I just wanted to kill, kill, kill,
And it took me fifty years to stop hating. I
managed to empty my heart of hatred, because when you're
full of hatred, there's no room for anything else. And
I don't hate anymore. I don't hate at a People

(35:00):
say to me, well, have you forgiven? That's another problem
I have. I can forgive anything that happens to me.
Whatever you do to me, I can forgive you. But
I don't have the right to forgive for my father's death.
He's the only one who can forgive. For his death.
I cannot forgive. And I always tell my boys, if
anybody kills me and you forgive them, I'll haunt you

(35:21):
because you don't forgive on my behalf. But I don't hate.
And you know, people say to me, well, what's your religion?
I said, I suppose it's love. I'm a Christmas Jew.
I always have a tree. But I truly believe that
the only thing we can do is go ahead and

(35:41):
try and not repeat it. And I'm a very happy person,
believe it or not. You know, I have four sons,
and every time I gave birth to one of them.
It was giving the finger to Hitler. I have four
granddaughters and they range in ethnicity half Chinese, half Mexican,

(36:04):
half African American. I even have one who's half German.
When my eldest son got married to a very nice
Canadian actress, he came and told me about her. I
was overjoyed. He says, it's a slight problem. I said,
what can there be? He says, well, her father was
a German army sergeant. I said, I swallowed, and I

(36:25):
swallowed again, and then I thought, no, we don't visit
the sense of the father and the children. We don't.
And she became my daughter in law. And I remember
holding their little daughter in my arms when she was born, beautiful,
beautiful baby, and the tears were just pouring, and I
was thinking, here's the grandchild of a perpetrator and the victim,

(36:46):
and she's perfect. And this is how life has to
go forward. This is what we need to do. We
don't go back. We go forward. We love these children
and we try and change the world, but we don't
go back. We stop the hatred to stop it right here.

(37:08):
I survived, and that's an incredible, incredible success to be alive.
And when you think of like Elizabeth, not only did
she save me, but she saved the whole generation, my
sons and my grandchildren. And my son David just has
a little boy recently. He is two years old and
they're expecting a little girl in September. So in fact,

(37:31):
it's ten fingers to hit or just four. If you
give in to a bully, you become a victim. I'm
not a victim. I'm a survivor, and I'm going to
fight for this until I stop talking, because I don't
believe that we have to give up to evil. The
only way we can fight it is to resist it
and to try and do good. And you know, ten

(37:54):
percent of people are really nice and ten percent are
pretty shitty and nasty. Unfortunately, sheep, it's a sheep who
scare me. The sheep will allow a dictator to rise.
A sheep will stand by and let Hitler do what
he did. A sheep will stand by and do nothing,
whereas a good person might have to actually stand up

(38:14):
and do something. There was a wonderful man that I
was listening to some lectures. His name was Ben Ferens.
He was one of the prosecutors in Nuremberg when they
put the Nazis on trial. He was the youngest prosecutor ever.
He was a young immigrant. He was telling on one
of his lectures. He was talking about his father who

(38:35):
came to this country and he was a simple man,
a shoemaker or something, and he would sit his two
children down at the dinner table, young children, and he
would say to them, what have you done for humanity today?
They had to do something good every day for humanity.
They had to open a door for somebody, pick up
some trash, feed the dog, help an old lady across

(38:56):
the street. I tell children in school, please do something
good every day too. You don't have to save everybody's
life like Elizabeth saved mind. But you can go and
sit with that kid that nobody wants to talk to.
Look at that sad child. He might have a very
heavy baggage. We all have baggages on our backs. We
all have some tragedy we're carrying around. And if we

(39:19):
could only be a little bit kinder to each other,
this whole world could change. And it's up to this
generation to change the world, because is so much better
than the one before. These kids get it they get it,
and they know that if they don't stop banning books,
and if they don't stop banning rights of people and

(39:40):
banning women's rights and banning voting rights, if they don't
try and stop that, their world will go to hell.
And it's up to them to create a better world.
And I think they will do it because nobody else
is going to do it for them. As far as
I'm concerned, as long as I have breath, I will
go and keep talking. It's hard, because you know, it's

(40:00):
a long way to school and then I speak for
an hour an hour and a half. I take questions,
but I do it almost every day. Everybody says I
suffer from terminal optimism. I do. But I think it's
going to be okay, and my little grandchildren will have
a good life because these young people today will fight

(40:22):
for it.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
Welcome back, This is Alive again, joining me for a
conversation about today's story or my other Alive against story.
Producers Kate Sweeney, Nicholas Takowski, and Brent Day, and I'm
your host, Dan bush Nick.

Speaker 3 (41:00):
How did you come across Kathy Preston.

Speaker 4 (41:03):
I went up and worked for her theater company in
Center Barnstead, New Hampshire, when I was twenty four years old.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
Oh really, yeah.

Speaker 4 (41:16):
She and her husband Gordon, who is a delightful sort
of prickly, very funny British man, they had they started
a theater company and they did educational theater tours and

(41:37):
I was in one of their touring companies. Kathy, for
some reason took a particular interest in me. I would
literally be down in the kitchen with the other actors
in this giant farmhouse that we were all staying in
in New Hampshire in the dead of winter, and we
would hear through the events upstairs Kathy from the office, Hello, Hello,

(42:01):
can you hear me? And we would all get quiet
and we go yeah, and you go, is Nick down there?
I go, yes, he goes Nick Darling. Could you come
and bring me a coffee?

Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yes, ma'am.

Speaker 4 (42:15):
And I would go and poor coffee and walk it
up to her, and it was just like it became
kind of a joke in the company. But I had
a health scare while I was up there. I won't
go into it too much, but she ended up driving
me to the hospital in Conquered which was like an

(42:37):
hour away, and while we were driving she told me
this story, and I think, just through this, through just
the drive and through like you know, running her coffee
or you know, doing her bidding for her. I felt
very close to her. At one point she even said, like,

(42:59):
you know, Nick, I think that in a different life,
I was probably a mother or something.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
She has the.

Speaker 4 (43:07):
Most immense, kind, but very like pointed presence. She has
no bullshit. She is who she says she is. She
shows you that she's very patient with people, but at
the same time she does not suffer fools or bullshit.
To sort of, in that brief time, be like an

(43:27):
object of her affection. Feels like one of the great
gifts of my life that this incredible force of nature
could love me. And it was weird because I was
in a time in my life where I did not
feel very lovable.

Speaker 5 (43:43):
And it's so interesting, Like I asked you that question,
like how did you meet her, not necessarily expecting you
not in fact, not at all, and expecting you to
have a personal connection. And when you said, oh, yeah,
she was running she and her husband were running this
theater company in New Hampshire, I kind of gasped, like
and then I thought, Okay, why am I surprised, And
I think it's because of I think we have a

(44:03):
tendency sometimes to put history under glass and be like,
that was that time, and this person who was a
Holocaust survivor, this was their thing and this is what
they did. And so it always feels especially poignant and
incredible for somebody who led that life to then have

(44:25):
an experience and impact and do something completely different with
their life and impact somebody that I know and that
I walk around with.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
Oh amazing.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
And when she.

Speaker 4 (44:37):
We should definitely plug her her books here, especially Hidden,
which was a which is a It's her story told
in a graphic novel. It's gorgeous, an excellent way to
tell the story of a child going through this with her.

Speaker 1 (44:56):
The most hopeful POV that we've heard yet in the show.
The most hopeful is coming from the perspective of somebody
who watched the world pretty much almost end right. Nobody
has had that we've talked to has seen as much.
She watched complete and destruction of society and civilization and

(45:18):
everyone she knew that.

Speaker 3 (45:19):
Moment she was like, oh no, the Germans would never
do that, right.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
And so the person, the person who watched the most,
who witnessed the most destruction at the earliest point in
their life. It has the most optimistic and hopeful POVM. Hmm,
isn't that crazy?

Speaker 4 (45:34):
Oh, it's it's absolutely insane.

Speaker 1 (45:36):
Well, maybe that's exactly the way it should. Maybe that's
you know, having dealt with that and survived that, what
else do you What else are you going to do
with the rest of your life except see the beauty
and hope and things. I don't know, what do you think.

Speaker 4 (45:49):
She processed all this stuff when she was a child?
And these, I mean, these same things are happening h
elsewhere in the world, children facing down horror and watching
as their entire families and communities are completely wiped from
the face of the earth. Hearing a child's perspective in

(46:10):
this moment in history is absolutely necessary, because we're being
asked every day to deny our humanity and to deny
the humanity of the people that this is currently happening to.
I think it's important that we hear. This doesn't just
happen to adults. This doesn't just happen to This doesn't

(46:33):
just happen to bad people. This happens to people who
have no comprehension of why because they're four years old.
They're five years old. They don't know why the world
hates them. They've done nothing. They didn't ask to be here,
they didn't ask for suffering, they didn't cast aspersions on

(46:57):
you or anybody. I think hearing a child's perspective of this,
and hearing about how she couldn't even comprehend why this
man would hate her, that's happening hundreds of thousands of
times over across the planet as we speak, and we
allow it because we don't understand the human consequences, the

(47:19):
consequences to the most innocence. We're for some reason as
a society, maybe because we seem incapable of seeing humanity.
And I think sometimes it takes a child's story. It shouldn't,
it shouldn't have to take a child's story, But it
takes a child's story to make us really gasp and
to make us feel sick to our stomachs. And we
should feel sick to our stomachs. We should, because that's

(47:43):
when change happens. Is when we are repulsed, When everybody
is repulsed by what happens, that's when real change happens.
And hearing this horrifying story from a child and hearing
that she's able to come out of it, pushing harder
for humanity. Despite the fact that it was humanity that
killed her father, that took the people she loved, that

(48:04):
took the little boy she used to run around with
away from her, she still has faith in that, especially
for the children that are coming up. Now there's hope
for the children.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
She gives us a tool in her words, she says
to do good. She equates doing good with resistance. So
even if you are looking at the world, in the
horrors of the world, and you think what can I do?
What can I do? What can I do?

Speaker 2 (48:28):
Well?

Speaker 1 (48:28):
She gives it to you right here. She says, you know,
don't look at yourself as as a victim, look at
you know, look at yourself as a reva. Beyond that,
she says, what are you doing for humanity every day?
What have you done good for humanity today? And that's
and she gives us this wonderful gift of like doing good,
just simply helping, helping you know, the kid who is

(48:51):
otherwise lonely and feeling abandoned. Doing good is resistance. That
is the resistant thing.

Speaker 4 (48:57):
Absolutely, But I think that also, so though those acts
may add up and make the world better, I think
that the kind of resistance she's also talking about is
pushing back against bullies, is pushing back against the big powers,
and that we can't have a good world if we
let the bullies win. We can't live in a good

(49:19):
world and let the bullies win. And I think that
right now, as we are living in an era where
it's going to be asked of us more and more
to we're gonna have a choice to either protect ourselves
and sit back quietly and let things happen around us
like many Germans did, like eighty percent, I mean, or

(49:41):
we can fucking stand up and push back and put
ourselves at hazard to a certain extent to do good
in the service of good. And that's something that's alien
to a lot of people, I think, And so it's
very seldom been asked of us to stand up in
the last twenty thirty years. And I think we're reaching

(50:04):
a point now where there's just going to be in
there's just going to be a point where we have
to make a choice. Do we put ourselves at hazard
and stand or do we allow history to wash over us?
And in thirty years look back and go like, well,
there was nothing I could.

Speaker 6 (50:22):
Do, and it encroaches slowly. I mean, I think people
assumed that the Holocaust was something that the a light
switch went on, and this happened, but the rights were
gradually taken away. The course language to different groups of
people was normalized. We see it happening here absolutely, And
when we went to Berlin, I mean I knew that

(50:42):
the history already, but we went through the Topography of Terror,
which is the Museum of the Holocaust, of how it happened,
from discrediting the press to saying it's singling out this
group of people is causing the problem.

Speaker 1 (50:55):
And it is so hidden too. She didn't even believe it,
so I did, but she nobody believed. And you know,
they were like, no, these concentration camps couldn't have happened, right,
But like you were saying, you know, and they couldn't
imagine it. It's the civilized, the most civilized nation in
your German Germany. How could happen there? I don't believe it.
But then so it happens without you knowing it, and
it happens and they don't just show up one day

(51:17):
and take you to the gas chambers that did happen.
But before that they have stars, yellow stars, and before.

Speaker 6 (51:25):
That they can't they can't have a law.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
You can't tee and you can't be a teacher, and
you can't be a lawyer, and you can't.

Speaker 6 (51:31):
And it's perfectly justifiable for some our camp cans and property.
And three years later, now this right is taken away
and then suddenly you're in a camp animal form.

Speaker 5 (51:39):
I found myself thinking, as you all were talking about
sort of this, these great arcs we see of like
rises and falls of fascism and more certainly in a
period of rising. Now, is you know, where do we
stand individually as humans and what can.

Speaker 3 (51:54):
Help us to resist that?

Speaker 5 (51:55):
Because sure, we can point fingers all day and say,
well we should be standing up against this, sure, but
what tools do we.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
Need internally to be able to do that?

Speaker 5 (52:05):
And you know, I think about back to these other
stories and how a lot of us are sort of
walking around and feeling like isolated individuals. And so we are,
you know, walking around and carrying our individual weights of
guilt or whatever it is, and just sort of feeling
like nothing's right. So what helps us to get away
from that it's this sense of in part of feeling

(52:28):
like we are connected to other people, which are some
of the themes we've heard in these other stories.

Speaker 3 (52:35):
Not getting bogged down in the sort of specifics of
who we.

Speaker 5 (52:40):
Are and our egos and our individualized details right about
who we are and.

Speaker 1 (52:44):
Our our separateness.

Speaker 3 (52:49):
Yeah, yeah, our identities. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (52:51):
That was the term I was looking for. And yeah,
I'm thinking about some of the other storytellers who at
this present moment in their storytelling are still feeling very
much bogged down by guilt or depression or post traumatic stress.

Speaker 3 (53:10):
And what she's been through.

Speaker 5 (53:13):
And her ability to say it comes unbidden and there's
nothing you can do about it.

Speaker 3 (53:17):
These are things that sort of pass in and out
of us.

Speaker 5 (53:20):
But you know, it's sort of her ability to sit
there and see that these feelings. You know, I am
not the storm, right, but the storm kind of passes
through me.

Speaker 3 (53:31):
And I was really struck by her ability to do that.

Speaker 4 (53:34):
I think that the most important basic building block of
fighting bullies is being able to see the humanity in
other people around you, particularly people that are not like you.
I think you have to have that, and I think
you have to fight for that in order to feel

(53:54):
the fire underneath your ass to actually help to make change.
And you do that by listening. You do that by
going out and meeting the community where you're at, You're
not History is not happening to you. You are in
the stream with everything else, and you are a part
of it, and you are a thread in what can

(54:16):
become a rope, and that rope can pull people forward
or it can hang us.

Speaker 1 (54:27):
Next time on a Live Again, we meet singer songwriter
Blair Kremenz, whose life, identity, and music completely transformed after
a near fatal head injury.

Speaker 7 (54:37):
The way that the accident went down is just a
tremendous metaphor. As this dog was pulling me on a skateboard,
that's just me letting the world take me where where
it wants me to go. There was something else pulling me,
you know, in a different direction, and I was more
than a little lost. I hit the pavement so hard
it fractured the base of my skull into my ear canal,

(55:00):
and blood started pouring out of my ear.

Speaker 1 (55:06):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die
Nicholas Dakowski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovett. Additional
music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick
and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional
production support. Our studio engineers are Rima El Kali and

(55:26):
Nomes Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhartzlovitchka, Brent Dye,
and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez.
I'm your host, Dan Bush. Thank you to Kathy Preston.
As she has said, there are less and less people
alive from the period I am from, and the more
people die, the less availability there is to connect.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
With the past.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
I speak for the people who cannot speak for themselves.
With that in mind, we hope you share her story
as well. For more information about Kathy and her work
and books, you can go to Katti Press dot com.
That's k A T I p R E. S d
O N dot com. Alive Again is a production of
iHeart Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative

(56:10):
near death experience to share, we'd love to hear your story.
Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com.
That's a l i V e A g A I
N p R O j e c T at gmail
dot com.