March 10, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, the late Judah Samet tells the harrowing story of how he and his family managed to survive the Holocaust.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories on February fifth,
nineteen thirty eight. Judas Senate was born in Hungary to
a family of entrepreneurs. In March of nineteen forty four,
the Nazis entered his family's town and forced them onto
trains bound for Auschwitz. They wouldn't make it there. Let's
(00:33):
get into the story. Here is the late Judas Senate
with his story of survival.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
In my train, there was this guy. I thought it
was an old men.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
He had a stubble, and I remember the sweater was gray,
and they led jacket on. He was dead ordered a
few days. The train would stop every two three days
to take the dead and bury him or burn them.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
And they took him too.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
And I was very angry cause I lost my pillow
and I lost my windbreaker. You know, you know that
didn't mean anything. By then, modesty was gone, desire was gone,
We lost sense of smell. The whole train became like
(01:24):
a big toilet. One bucket was two three gallons of water,
and the other bucket was for toilet purposes. Nobody could
get to it anyhow, And also you know that bucket
was for a man and woman.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
We didn't have men and woman separate, so we but they.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Had a bucket with the water, two three gallons and
they put maybe eighty ninety people in each.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
There was only standing room.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
So my mother talked to the commandant, which she was
not supposed to do, and she said, look, we know
very we are going, but surely you don't want us
to die on the way there. What would the people
in Czechoslovakia that we were true? What wouldn't they say
about the Germans? They were the flower of the Western
(02:12):
world nineteen thirty three they we won half of the
Nobel prizes thirty seven and a half percent of that
was won by Jews. What would these people say? What
hand to the Germans? So the sergeant to cut his
pistol and put it to my mother's head. They had
a very specific order by Hitler. If a Jew opens
(02:35):
is not you shoot him on the spot. The only
way you can talk is if you ask me a question,
he may answer. So he was gonna do his duty.
So the commandant, with not even turning around, called him,
you dunk affew idiot.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Can't you see you killer? We have nobody to talk to. Now.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
My mother knew the rules, but She figured that if
you make it to Auschwitz, we'll be dead, you know,
in fifteen minutes coming out of the smokestacks.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
She was very courageous.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
She got lucky, you know, that he placed the bucket
with an oil drownd filled with water. There were many,
maybe hundreds already were sick, would have died without water.
So she really saved a lot of people on the train.
So there was actually the first miracle, you know, because
(03:32):
this happened with her, not once, several times. We ended
up in a lumber yard and the owner was an
aster in major Nazi. He helped his shirt taunting us,
which a big sweater tooth on his chest. He also
had French prisoners of war. They were abiding by the
(03:54):
Geneva Code and they were fed well, but we were
fed starvation. We had starvation diet. My mother would go
out at night after working twelve hours and she would
go to the village and she would barter with the
wife's there get babies. She said, get yarn and get
(04:18):
a needle, and I'll make clothes for your children. My
mother could do anything with her hands. She's the one
who put the factory together. She's the one who talked
to my father, who was a scholar, was an intellectual,
how to work the machines and everything else. So she
was making him clothes for their babies. For that she
(04:39):
would get a little cheese cup legs, some bread, not
too much because they were not supposed to deal with
you'll see that. So they had to be very careful
and they she would come probably and maybe one o'clock
in the morning. She would come back, getting up five
(04:59):
o'clock in morning to go to work again. One night
she didn't come home, so we didn't know what happened.
By next day she didn't come. Panic started to take
over it because we thought my mother, we couldn't survive.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
There's no way.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
She was like an eagle, spreading her wings and covering us. See,
my mother had three qualities. First, she was a beautiful woman.
She was short four ten, but she was built, you know. Secondly,
she wasn't just smarter out of the buck, she was brilliant.
And thirdly she had guts. And she was a teenager
(05:39):
and her father was entrepreneur. He was in the holes
of grocery store. He used to go to the grocery
store to collect but that Hungarian was so into Semitic.
You know, if we don't have enough curses in this country,
go to hungry. So he was afraid to go to
the store. So he said, my mother, she's fifteen, sixteen
(06:01):
years old. She walks into the store. She puts her
hands behind her back, starts walking. The guy knew who
she was, so open the mat. But my money didn't
pay attention. She always thought us, don't listen to what
they have to say. Let it fly over your shoulder.
(06:22):
Watch their hands, cause words cannot kill you, but their
hands can kill you. Didn't pay any attention than a
very little, low voice. She says, well, your shell seem
to be.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Stacked pretty well.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
You don't really need anything today, but you know people
are gonna come today, later on, that come tomorrow, that'll
come the day after. In a few days, you're not
gonna have anything to sell. You think my father's gonna
give you another nickel sword. She came home with the money,
but she did that kind of stuff for him many times.
(06:56):
She was fearless. It's good and it's bad. It's one
of the things that I inherited from her. So anyhow,
without her, there's no way we could make it a
few weeks later, now, a few days later, I think,
all of a sudden she showed up. We didn't not,
(07:16):
I mean, why didn't they kill her?
Speaker 2 (07:18):
What happened?
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Somebody in the village squiled, so she was arrested put
in jail. In jail, she shared the only did the
Austrian beauty twenty years old maybe, and.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
They kept him.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
She said, he was as handsome as Hollywood was so handsome.
And my mother would do anything to save us, whatever
it took to save us.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
She never told us why and how. But anyhow I.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Used to be I used to squeeze her, you know,
I said, what happened in that the uh prison? And
she said, well, the girl, the Austrian girl, was a
beautiful girl. And I said, what was her crime? And
she said, because Hitler gave a direct order to all
the beauties between eighteen and twenty five to entertain soldiers
(08:11):
coming home on furlough. And she, you know, asked her
as a Catholic country, and she came from a very
good family.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
And they hung her.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
But my mother she convinced the guy that her four
kids and you know, her husband sickly won't make it
with that hair. She had a way of talking to people.
She never ever raised their voice, not even on us.
Our biggest fear regarding my mother was disappointing her. We
(08:44):
knew that she loved us so much. First of all,
she would do everything, which she did okay, but it
wasn't just a mild lot, it was the whole body
and could tell you know.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
So he disappointed. The disappointed here was terrible.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
And you're listening to the late Judas Semate, who is
a survivor of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting and
who died in September of twenty twenty two at the
age of eighty four, sharing the story of how his
mom saved him and the family. He described his mother
as having three qualities. She was beautiful, She wasn't just smart,
(09:27):
she was brilliant, and she had guts, and he shared
some of the stories of her courage. My biggest fear
I had was disappointing my mother. To disappoint her was terrible.
When we come back more of this story from the
late Judas senate here on our American stories, and we
(10:09):
returned to our American stories and with Holocaust survivor Judah
Samt when we last left off Judah was telling us
about his gutsy mom who would do anything to ensure
the survival of her family in the harshest of conditions.
Let's return to the story. Here again is Judah.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
A few weeks later, the trains arrived. Finally they loaded
us up on the train and we arrived in bergen Belsen.
The method there unlike Aushwitz where they killed you right away.
The method there was starving you to death. And what
happens when you are starved, It kills your immunity system.
(10:55):
And the worst thing in the camps was typhoid. Typhoid
killed more people than anything else, and also dysentery. Now
dysentery was because if you don't need, your stomach starts
to shing shring to the point where you don't have
a stomach, so you put it in and it goes
straight out. The whole camp was like a toilet. But
(11:19):
the Germans appointed what they called the juden Rat, which
was the Jewish committee. Their job was to keep the
camp clean. They picked them up for brutality, and they
had to be brutal because they the Nazis watched them
and they were not brutally enough.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
They were shouldn't.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
They never had any problem replacing anybody. So in bergen Belsen,
when we arrived there, we already saw at the gate
they were about two stories of corpses. They kept dying
all day. Many of them just gave up, right.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Down and die.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
I mean, if you don't have hope, you know, you've
been there two three months the same you get.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Weaker and weaker and weaker. So is self. You laid
down and you do it, or what you do? You
jump on the fence and you died that way, so way.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
At that point that didn't mean anything to me anymore,
you know, because that's all you saw all the time.
That and they, uh, the starvation continued. That three men's horns.
One for the officers, for like a five star restaurant,
the best of everything.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Second one was for the guards.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
And the guards usually there were some Nazi, some Germans,
but mostly the local Hungarians. Y you had Ukrainians, the Lithuanians.
They were the worst of the worst, and they were
watching you.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
No.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Eventually I made a friend that was about the same
sizes myself, the same age. By then I was seven
years older. They believe me. By then, you were a
man and this friend of mine. We always followed them,
the officers coming out of their mentiles. They were always
having a wing or they had, say, some other kind
(13:23):
of meat, and they were chewing on. And then when
they finished their throat on the ground and we drew
ourselves on that and grabbed it. There was nothing to eat, maybe,
but the taste was still there and that kind of
filled us up. Now, in the meantime, the camp was
inundated with lice. I mean, the lice was unbelievable. So
(13:48):
my mother convinced us to eat the lice. She said,
the lice are blood suckers, and blood is protein, and
you eat that. So between dead and that, they and
what they gave us to eat, which was a h
a small hard drug black bread for the six of us,
(14:12):
and some colored water that was supposed to be soup.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
That was our meal for the day.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
But my mother did she broke the bread into olive
size and she shared us five six times a day
with the tea spoon of that water. So she was
the hero in her story, my mother. So anyhow, we
were there for ten months, maybe ten and a half months,
(14:43):
and then a turd train came and they asked four
volunteers to get on the train twenty five hundred, and
my mother took us and put us on the train,
and that that's another thing.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
That's another thing that I discussed with her year's life.
We knew it's a dead terrain because they were all
dead trains.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
We were supposed to die, and they that tra The
train was going narn around and around. They were looking
for a place where they could finish ourself, but they
uh somehow we survived, and eventually after a few weeks
we stopped in the forest near Farres Laban and we thought, well,
(15:29):
maybe this is where.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
They're gonna finish us. And sure enough we heard a
big grumble. It's a tank.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
We noticed this right away, that the tart was not
aimed at the train. And then the tart opened and
the soldier popped up, and he didn't have a German uniform.
So my father was studying English order it was a scarlet,
so he picked it up English.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Very first he yelled Americans.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
The Americans, Americans, and we were saved by the Americans.
From there they took us to Hilar Slaven. Hiller Slaven
was a mid sized don over the Rhine where the
Rhine was very broad and very deep, and there was
a big breach, but the breach was bummed out, so
(16:22):
we figured.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
That's for David.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
They were going to close the doors and push the
train down and just kill twenty whatever twenty two. I
don't know how many were aye a how many were
still alive, the chances that she took s I remember,
I asked her, you put us on the tr train,
you know it was the death train. How did you
(16:47):
make the decision? She says, I had the choice to
between the the maybe and the short thing. The short
thing was if we stayed in Bergan, was now that
two days we would feel dead because they've stopped feeding
or even water. Look, a healthy man can live without
water two three days, but a sick person we were
(17:10):
already sick.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
There.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Maybe was if I put you understand, maybe another miracle
is going to happen like the first one.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
And she was right.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
She had the right instinct and we survived. And I
spoke to my brother about it. You know, it was
in Israel, and they always said somebody should make a
movie about this woman.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
I don't know who can play her.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery, and this interview was conducted
before Judah died. He's also a survivor of the Tree
of Life Synagogue shooting, anti Semitism rearing its head again
in his lifetime and so close to home. And by
(18:00):
the way, we tell these stories for a reason. There
were a few survivors left from the Holocaust, and it
was the Americans in large measure in the Allied troops
that liberated these camps, as they showed so vividly in
Bandit Brothers. All of the Allied troops figured out why
we were fighting when they stumbled on these death camps.
That a country like Germany, a beautiful country like Germany,
(18:23):
could sink to those depths of depravity. What a sad tale,
and what a story of his mother's courage and her intuition.
The chances you took. Why did you put us on
that third train? He asked his mom. The sure thing
or the maybe were the two things she described staying
(18:43):
in that camp. It was certain death, the maybe getting
on that train and hoping another miracle would happen, which
it did. Judas Sammet's story, the story of the Holocaust,
one story at a time, which we do here on
our American stories
And we returned to our American stories on February fifth,
nineteen thirty eight. Judas Senate was born in Hungary to
a family of entrepreneurs. In March of nineteen forty four,
the Nazis entered his family's town and forced them onto
trains bound for Auschwitz. They wouldn't make it there. Let's
(00:33):
get into the story. Here is the late Judas Senate
with his story of survival.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
In my train, there was this guy. I thought it
was an old men.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
He had a stubble, and I remember the sweater was gray,
and they led jacket on. He was dead ordered a
few days. The train would stop every two three days
to take the dead and bury him or burn them.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
And they took him too.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
And I was very angry cause I lost my pillow
and I lost my windbreaker. You know, you know that
didn't mean anything. By then, modesty was gone, desire was gone,
We lost sense of smell. The whole train became like
(01:24):
a big toilet. One bucket was two three gallons of water,
and the other bucket was for toilet purposes. Nobody could
get to it anyhow, And also you know that bucket
was for a man and woman.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
We didn't have men and woman separate, so we but they.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Had a bucket with the water, two three gallons and
they put maybe eighty ninety people in each.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
There was only standing room.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
So my mother talked to the commandant, which she was
not supposed to do, and she said, look, we know
very we are going, but surely you don't want us
to die on the way there. What would the people
in Czechoslovakia that we were true? What wouldn't they say
about the Germans? They were the flower of the Western
(02:12):
world nineteen thirty three they we won half of the
Nobel prizes thirty seven and a half percent of that
was won by Jews. What would these people say? What
hand to the Germans? So the sergeant to cut his
pistol and put it to my mother's head. They had
a very specific order by Hitler. If a Jew opens
(02:35):
is not you shoot him on the spot. The only
way you can talk is if you ask me a question,
he may answer. So he was gonna do his duty.
So the commandant, with not even turning around, called him,
you dunk affew idiot.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Can't you see you killer? We have nobody to talk to. Now.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
My mother knew the rules, but She figured that if
you make it to Auschwitz, we'll be dead, you know,
in fifteen minutes coming out of the smokestacks.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
She was very courageous.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
She got lucky, you know, that he placed the bucket
with an oil drownd filled with water. There were many,
maybe hundreds already were sick, would have died without water.
So she really saved a lot of people on the train.
So there was actually the first miracle, you know, because
(03:32):
this happened with her, not once, several times. We ended
up in a lumber yard and the owner was an
aster in major Nazi. He helped his shirt taunting us,
which a big sweater tooth on his chest. He also
had French prisoners of war. They were abiding by the
(03:54):
Geneva Code and they were fed well, but we were
fed starvation. We had starvation diet. My mother would go
out at night after working twelve hours and she would
go to the village and she would barter with the
wife's there get babies. She said, get yarn and get
(04:18):
a needle, and I'll make clothes for your children. My
mother could do anything with her hands. She's the one
who put the factory together. She's the one who talked
to my father, who was a scholar, was an intellectual,
how to work the machines and everything else. So she
was making him clothes for their babies. For that she
(04:39):
would get a little cheese cup legs, some bread, not
too much because they were not supposed to deal with
you'll see that. So they had to be very careful
and they she would come probably and maybe one o'clock
in the morning. She would come back, getting up five
(04:59):
o'clock in morning to go to work again. One night
she didn't come home, so we didn't know what happened.
By next day she didn't come. Panic started to take
over it because we thought my mother, we couldn't survive.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
There's no way.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
She was like an eagle, spreading her wings and covering us. See,
my mother had three qualities. First, she was a beautiful woman.
She was short four ten, but she was built, you know. Secondly,
she wasn't just smarter out of the buck, she was brilliant.
And thirdly she had guts. And she was a teenager
(05:39):
and her father was entrepreneur. He was in the holes
of grocery store. He used to go to the grocery
store to collect but that Hungarian was so into Semitic.
You know, if we don't have enough curses in this country,
go to hungry. So he was afraid to go to
the store. So he said, my mother, she's fifteen, sixteen
(06:01):
years old. She walks into the store. She puts her
hands behind her back, starts walking. The guy knew who
she was, so open the mat. But my money didn't
pay attention. She always thought us, don't listen to what
they have to say. Let it fly over your shoulder.
(06:22):
Watch their hands, cause words cannot kill you, but their
hands can kill you. Didn't pay any attention than a
very little, low voice. She says, well, your shell seem
to be.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Stacked pretty well.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
You don't really need anything today, but you know people
are gonna come today, later on, that come tomorrow, that'll
come the day after. In a few days, you're not
gonna have anything to sell. You think my father's gonna
give you another nickel sword. She came home with the money,
but she did that kind of stuff for him many times.
(06:56):
She was fearless. It's good and it's bad. It's one
of the things that I inherited from her. So anyhow,
without her, there's no way we could make it a
few weeks later, now, a few days later, I think,
all of a sudden she showed up. We didn't not,
(07:16):
I mean, why didn't they kill her?
Speaker 2 (07:18):
What happened?
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Somebody in the village squiled, so she was arrested put
in jail. In jail, she shared the only did the
Austrian beauty twenty years old maybe, and.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
They kept him.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
She said, he was as handsome as Hollywood was so handsome.
And my mother would do anything to save us, whatever
it took to save us.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
She never told us why and how. But anyhow I.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Used to be I used to squeeze her, you know,
I said, what happened in that the uh prison? And
she said, well, the girl, the Austrian girl, was a
beautiful girl. And I said, what was her crime? And
she said, because Hitler gave a direct order to all
the beauties between eighteen and twenty five to entertain soldiers
(08:11):
coming home on furlough. And she, you know, asked her
as a Catholic country, and she came from a very
good family.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
And they hung her.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
But my mother she convinced the guy that her four
kids and you know, her husband sickly won't make it
with that hair. She had a way of talking to people.
She never ever raised their voice, not even on us.
Our biggest fear regarding my mother was disappointing her. We
(08:44):
knew that she loved us so much. First of all,
she would do everything, which she did okay, but it
wasn't just a mild lot, it was the whole body
and could tell you know.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
So he disappointed. The disappointed here was terrible.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
And you're listening to the late Judas Semate, who is
a survivor of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting and
who died in September of twenty twenty two at the
age of eighty four, sharing the story of how his
mom saved him and the family. He described his mother
as having three qualities. She was beautiful, She wasn't just smart,
(09:27):
she was brilliant, and she had guts, and he shared
some of the stories of her courage. My biggest fear
I had was disappointing my mother. To disappoint her was terrible.
When we come back more of this story from the
late Judas senate here on our American stories, and we
(10:09):
returned to our American stories and with Holocaust survivor Judah
Samt when we last left off Judah was telling us
about his gutsy mom who would do anything to ensure
the survival of her family in the harshest of conditions.
Let's return to the story. Here again is Judah.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
A few weeks later, the trains arrived. Finally they loaded
us up on the train and we arrived in bergen Belsen.
The method there unlike Aushwitz where they killed you right away.
The method there was starving you to death. And what
happens when you are starved, It kills your immunity system.
(10:55):
And the worst thing in the camps was typhoid. Typhoid
killed more people than anything else, and also dysentery. Now
dysentery was because if you don't need, your stomach starts
to shing shring to the point where you don't have
a stomach, so you put it in and it goes
straight out. The whole camp was like a toilet. But
(11:19):
the Germans appointed what they called the juden Rat, which
was the Jewish committee. Their job was to keep the
camp clean. They picked them up for brutality, and they
had to be brutal because they the Nazis watched them
and they were not brutally enough.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
They were shouldn't.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
They never had any problem replacing anybody. So in bergen Belsen,
when we arrived there, we already saw at the gate
they were about two stories of corpses. They kept dying
all day. Many of them just gave up, right.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Down and die.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
I mean, if you don't have hope, you know, you've
been there two three months the same you get.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Weaker and weaker and weaker. So is self. You laid
down and you do it, or what you do? You
jump on the fence and you died that way, so way.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
At that point that didn't mean anything to me anymore,
you know, because that's all you saw all the time.
That and they, uh, the starvation continued. That three men's horns.
One for the officers, for like a five star restaurant,
the best of everything.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Second one was for the guards.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
And the guards usually there were some Nazi, some Germans,
but mostly the local Hungarians. Y you had Ukrainians, the Lithuanians.
They were the worst of the worst, and they were
watching you.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
No.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Eventually I made a friend that was about the same
sizes myself, the same age. By then I was seven
years older. They believe me. By then, you were a
man and this friend of mine. We always followed them,
the officers coming out of their mentiles. They were always
having a wing or they had, say, some other kind
(13:23):
of meat, and they were chewing on. And then when
they finished their throat on the ground and we drew
ourselves on that and grabbed it. There was nothing to eat, maybe,
but the taste was still there and that kind of
filled us up. Now, in the meantime, the camp was
inundated with lice. I mean, the lice was unbelievable. So
(13:48):
my mother convinced us to eat the lice. She said,
the lice are blood suckers, and blood is protein, and
you eat that. So between dead and that, they and
what they gave us to eat, which was a h
a small hard drug black bread for the six of us,
(14:12):
and some colored water that was supposed to be soup.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
That was our meal for the day.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
But my mother did she broke the bread into olive
size and she shared us five six times a day
with the tea spoon of that water. So she was
the hero in her story, my mother. So anyhow, we
were there for ten months, maybe ten and a half months,
(14:43):
and then a turd train came and they asked four
volunteers to get on the train twenty five hundred, and
my mother took us and put us on the train,
and that that's another thing.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
That's another thing that I discussed with her year's life.
We knew it's a dead terrain because they were all
dead trains.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
We were supposed to die, and they that tra The
train was going narn around and around. They were looking
for a place where they could finish ourself, but they
uh somehow we survived, and eventually after a few weeks
we stopped in the forest near Farres Laban and we thought, well,
(15:29):
maybe this is where.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
They're gonna finish us. And sure enough we heard a
big grumble. It's a tank.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
We noticed this right away, that the tart was not
aimed at the train. And then the tart opened and
the soldier popped up, and he didn't have a German uniform.
So my father was studying English order it was a scarlet,
so he picked it up English.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Very first he yelled Americans.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
The Americans, Americans, and we were saved by the Americans.
From there they took us to Hilar Slaven. Hiller Slaven
was a mid sized don over the Rhine where the
Rhine was very broad and very deep, and there was
a big breach, but the breach was bummed out, so
(16:22):
we figured.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
That's for David.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
They were going to close the doors and push the
train down and just kill twenty whatever twenty two. I
don't know how many were aye a how many were
still alive, the chances that she took s I remember,
I asked her, you put us on the tr train,
you know it was the death train. How did you
(16:47):
make the decision? She says, I had the choice to
between the the maybe and the short thing. The short
thing was if we stayed in Bergan, was now that
two days we would feel dead because they've stopped feeding
or even water. Look, a healthy man can live without
water two three days, but a sick person we were
(17:10):
already sick.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
There.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Maybe was if I put you understand, maybe another miracle
is going to happen like the first one.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
And she was right.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
She had the right instinct and we survived. And I
spoke to my brother about it. You know, it was
in Israel, and they always said somebody should make a
movie about this woman.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
I don't know who can play her.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery, and this interview was conducted
before Judah died. He's also a survivor of the Tree
of Life Synagogue shooting, anti Semitism rearing its head again
in his lifetime and so close to home. And by
(18:00):
the way, we tell these stories for a reason. There
were a few survivors left from the Holocaust, and it
was the Americans in large measure in the Allied troops
that liberated these camps, as they showed so vividly in
Bandit Brothers. All of the Allied troops figured out why
we were fighting when they stumbled on these death camps.
That a country like Germany, a beautiful country like Germany,
(18:23):
could sink to those depths of depravity. What a sad tale,
and what a story of his mother's courage and her intuition.
The chances you took. Why did you put us on
that third train? He asked his mom. The sure thing
or the maybe were the two things she described staying
(18:43):
in that camp. It was certain death, the maybe getting
on that train and hoping another miracle would happen, which
it did. Judas Sammet's story, the story of the Holocaust,
one story at a time, which we do here on
our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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