July 2, 2024 • 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 (00:40):
In my train, there was this guy I thought was
an old man. He had a stubble, and I remember
the sweater was gray and he had led jacket on it.
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. And they took him too.
(01:02):
And I was very angry because 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,
the 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 3 (01:38):
We didn't have men and women separate, so we but.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
They had a bucket with the water, two three gallons
and they put maybe eighty ninety people in each.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
There was only standing room.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
So my mother talked to the commandant, which she was
not supposed to do, and she said, look, we know
where 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 would they say?
But the Germans they were the flower of the Western
(02:12):
world nineteen thirty three, they were 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 his
(02:36):
not you shoot him on the spot. The only way
you can talk is if you ask me a question,
he may answer.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
So he was going to do his duty.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
So the commandant, with not even turning around, called him,
you dunkaffee, idiot. Can't you see you killer? We have
nobody to talk to. Now my mother knew the rules,
but she figured word that if you make it to Auschwitz,
we'll be dead, you know, in fifteen minutes coming out
of the smokestacks.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
She was very courageous.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
She got lucky, you know that he placed the bucket
with an oil drown filled with water. There were many
maybe one hundreds, so that he 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,
(03:31):
you know, because 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 is a big sweater tooth on his chest.
He also had French prisoners of war. They were abiding
(03:54):
by the Geneva Code and they were fed well, but
we were fed starvation die.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
We had starvation diet. My mother would go out at.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Night after working twelve hours and she would go to
the village and she would.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Barter with the wife's there, get babies.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
She said, get yarn and get 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 tooked. 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
(04:39):
that she would get a little cheese cup, egs, some bread,
not too much because they were not supposed to deal
with you will see them, so they had to be
very careful and they she would come probably maybe one
o'clock in the morning. She would come back getting up
(04:59):
five o'clock wanting 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
ovid because we thought.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
My mother, we couldn't survive. There's no way.
Speaker 2 (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
(06:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Hands can kill you.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Didn't pay any attention than a very little, low voice.
She says, well, your shell seem to be stacked pretty well.
You don't really need anything today, But you know people
are gonna come today. Later on, they'll come tomorrow, they'll
come the day after. In a few days, you're not
gonna have anything to sell. You think my father's gonna
(06:48):
give you another nickel sword. She came home with the money,
but she did that kind of stuff for him many times.
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
(07:10):
few weeks later, now, a few days later, I think
all of a sudden she showed up. We didn't not,
I mean, why didn't they kill her?
Speaker 3 (07:18):
What happened?
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Somebody in the village squiled, so she was arrested put
in jail. In jail, she shared it only did the
Austrian beauty twenty years old maybe, and they kept him.
She said, he was as handsome as Hollywood was so handsome.
And my mother would do anything to save us, whatever
(07:43):
it took to save us.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
She never told us why and how, But anyhow.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
I 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 and the Astralian girl was
a beautiful girl. I said, what was her crying? 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 a furdle. And she, you know, asked
her as a Catholic country and she came from a
very good family, and they hung her. But my mother
she convinced the guy that her four kids and you know,
her husband sickly won't make it without her.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
She had a way of talking to people.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
She never ever raised their voice, not even on us.
Our biggest fear regarding my mother was disappointing her. We
knew that she loved us so much. First of all,
she would do everything, which she did okay, but it
wasn't just a mart lot, it was the whole body
(08:57):
and could tell you know, so disappointed.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
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 trains arrived.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Finally they loaded us up on the train and we
arrived in berghenm Bels. 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.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Your immunity system.
Speaker 2 (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, shrank to the point where you don't have
a stomach, so you put it in and it goes
straight out.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
The whole camp was like a toilet.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
But 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 the Nazis watched them
and they were not brutally enough. They were shouldn't they
(11:40):
never had any problem replacing anybody. So in berghen Belsen,
when we arrived here, 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 down
and die. I mean, if you don't have hope, you know,
(12:03):
you've been there two three months the same you get
weaker and weaker and weaker.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
So is self. You lay down and you do it,
or what you do? You jump on the fence and
you died that way, so way.
Speaker 2 (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 mensholds.
One for the officers, for like a five star restaurant,
the best of everything.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Second one was for the guards.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (12:59):
No.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Eventually I made a friend. There was about the same
sizes myself, the same age. By then I was seven
years older.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
They believe me. By then you were a man, and
this friend of mine.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
We always followed them, the officers coming out of their mensiles.
They were always having a wing or they had, say,
some other kind of meat and they were chewing on.
And then when they finished their truth on the ground
and we drew ourselves on that and grabbed it. There
was nothing to eat, maybe, but the taste was still
(13:35):
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 my mother convinced us to
eat the lice. She said, the lies are blood suckers,
and blood is protein.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
And you eat that.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
So between dead and that, they and what they gave
us to eat, which was a uh a small hard
drug black bread for the six of us, and some
colored water that was supposed to be soup. There was
our meal for the day. But my mother did she
(14:21):
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, and then a turd
(14:45):
train came and they asked for 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.
That's another thing that I discussed with her years. Like
we knew it's a dead terrain because they were all
dead trains. We were supposed to die, and they the
(15:09):
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 Farrest Laban
and we thought, well, maybe this is where.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
They're gonna finish us. And sure enough we heard a
big grumble.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
It's a tank. 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
or it was a scarlet, so he picked it up English.
(15:57):
Very first he yelled Americans, Americans, Americans, and we were
saved by the Americans.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
From there they.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Took us to Hilar slave Hilar Slaven was a mid
sized stan 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 we figured that's
what David. They were going to close the doors and
(16:25):
push the train down and just kill twenty whatever twenty two.
I don't know how many were ay, how many were
still alive, the chances that she took. So I remember,
I asked her, you put us on the third train,
you know it was the death train. How did you
(16:47):
make the decision? She says, I had the choice between
the the maybe and the short thing. The short thing
was if we stayed in bergen Bell was now that
two days we were feel dead because they stopped feeding
or even water. Look, a healthy man can live without
water two three days, but a sick person we were
(17:11):
already sick. The maybe was if I put you on
the strad maybe another miracle is going to happen like
the first one.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
And she was right.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
She had the right instinct and we survived. And I
spoke to my brother about it.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
You know. It was in Israel, and.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
They always said somebody should make a movie about this woman.
Speaker 3 (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 Bandi, 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, could sink
(18:24):
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
in that camp. It was certain death, the maybe getting
(18:48):
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 (00:40):
In my train, there was this guy I thought was
an old man. He had a stubble, and I remember
the sweater was gray and he had led jacket on it.
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. And they took him too.
(01:02):
And I was very angry because 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,
the 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 3 (01:38):
We didn't have men and women separate, so we but.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
They had a bucket with the water, two three gallons
and they put maybe eighty ninety people in each.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
There was only standing room.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
So my mother talked to the commandant, which she was
not supposed to do, and she said, look, we know
where 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 would they say?
But the Germans they were the flower of the Western
(02:12):
world nineteen thirty three, they were 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 his
(02:36):
not you shoot him on the spot. The only way
you can talk is if you ask me a question,
he may answer.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
So he was going to do his duty.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
So the commandant, with not even turning around, called him,
you dunkaffee, idiot. Can't you see you killer? We have
nobody to talk to. Now my mother knew the rules,
but she figured word that if you make it to Auschwitz,
we'll be dead, you know, in fifteen minutes coming out
of the smokestacks.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
She was very courageous.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
She got lucky, you know that he placed the bucket
with an oil drown filled with water. There were many
maybe one hundreds, so that he 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,
(03:31):
you know, because 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 is a big sweater tooth on his chest.
He also had French prisoners of war. They were abiding
(03:54):
by the Geneva Code and they were fed well, but
we were fed starvation die.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
We had starvation diet. My mother would go out at.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Night after working twelve hours and she would go to
the village and she would.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Barter with the wife's there, get babies.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
She said, get yarn and get 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 tooked. 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
(04:39):
that she would get a little cheese cup, egs, some bread,
not too much because they were not supposed to deal
with you will see them, so they had to be
very careful and they she would come probably maybe one
o'clock in the morning. She would come back getting up
(04:59):
five o'clock wanting 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
ovid because we thought.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
My mother, we couldn't survive. There's no way.
Speaker 2 (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
(06:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Hands can kill you.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Didn't pay any attention than a very little, low voice.
She says, well, your shell seem to be stacked pretty well.
You don't really need anything today, But you know people
are gonna come today. Later on, they'll come tomorrow, they'll
come the day after. In a few days, you're not
gonna have anything to sell. You think my father's gonna
(06:48):
give you another nickel sword. She came home with the money,
but she did that kind of stuff for him many times.
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
(07:10):
few weeks later, now, a few days later, I think
all of a sudden she showed up. We didn't not,
I mean, why didn't they kill her?
Speaker 3 (07:18):
What happened?
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Somebody in the village squiled, so she was arrested put
in jail. In jail, she shared it only did the
Austrian beauty twenty years old maybe, and they kept him.
She said, he was as handsome as Hollywood was so handsome.
And my mother would do anything to save us, whatever
(07:43):
it took to save us.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
She never told us why and how, But anyhow.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
I 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 and the Astralian girl was
a beautiful girl. I said, what was her crying? 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 a furdle. And she, you know, asked
her as a Catholic country and she came from a
very good family, and they hung her. But my mother
she convinced the guy that her four kids and you know,
her husband sickly won't make it without her.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
She had a way of talking to people.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
She never ever raised their voice, not even on us.
Our biggest fear regarding my mother was disappointing her. We
knew that she loved us so much. First of all,
she would do everything, which she did okay, but it
wasn't just a mart lot, it was the whole body
(08:57):
and could tell you know, so disappointed.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
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 trains arrived.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Finally they loaded us up on the train and we
arrived in berghenm Bels. 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.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Your immunity system.
Speaker 2 (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, shrank to the point where you don't have
a stomach, so you put it in and it goes
straight out.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
The whole camp was like a toilet.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
But 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 the Nazis watched them
and they were not brutally enough. They were shouldn't they
(11:40):
never had any problem replacing anybody. So in berghen Belsen,
when we arrived here, 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 down
and die. I mean, if you don't have hope, you know,
(12:03):
you've been there two three months the same you get
weaker and weaker and weaker.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
So is self. You lay down and you do it,
or what you do? You jump on the fence and
you died that way, so way.
Speaker 2 (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 mensholds.
One for the officers, for like a five star restaurant,
the best of everything.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Second one was for the guards.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (12:59):
No.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Eventually I made a friend. There was about the same
sizes myself, the same age. By then I was seven
years older.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
They believe me. By then you were a man, and
this friend of mine.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
We always followed them, the officers coming out of their mensiles.
They were always having a wing or they had, say,
some other kind of meat and they were chewing on.
And then when they finished their truth on the ground
and we drew ourselves on that and grabbed it. There
was nothing to eat, maybe, but the taste was still
(13:35):
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 my mother convinced us to
eat the lice. She said, the lies are blood suckers,
and blood is protein.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
And you eat that.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
So between dead and that, they and what they gave
us to eat, which was a uh a small hard
drug black bread for the six of us, and some
colored water that was supposed to be soup. There was
our meal for the day. But my mother did she
(14:21):
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, and then a turd
(14:45):
train came and they asked for 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.
That's another thing that I discussed with her years. Like
we knew it's a dead terrain because they were all
dead trains. We were supposed to die, and they the
(15:09):
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 Farrest Laban
and we thought, well, maybe this is where.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
They're gonna finish us. And sure enough we heard a
big grumble.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
It's a tank. 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
or it was a scarlet, so he picked it up English.
(15:57):
Very first he yelled Americans, Americans, Americans, and we were
saved by the Americans.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
From there they.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Took us to Hilar slave Hilar Slaven was a mid
sized stan 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 we figured that's
what David. They were going to close the doors and
(16:25):
push the train down and just kill twenty whatever twenty two.
I don't know how many were ay, how many were
still alive, the chances that she took. So I remember,
I asked her, you put us on the third train,
you know it was the death train. How did you
(16:47):
make the decision? She says, I had the choice between
the the maybe and the short thing. The short thing
was if we stayed in bergen Bell was now that
two days we were feel dead because they stopped feeding
or even water. Look, a healthy man can live without
water two three days, but a sick person we were
(17:11):
already sick. The maybe was if I put you on
the strad maybe another miracle is going to happen like
the first one.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
And she was right.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
She had the right instinct and we survived. And I
spoke to my brother about it.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
You know. It was in Israel, and.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
They always said somebody should make a movie about this woman.
Speaker 3 (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 Bandi, 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, could sink
(18:24):
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
in that camp. It was certain death, the maybe getting
(18:48):
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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