Holocaust Rememberance Day, 75 years ago
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jdmkleinPat Kinney is with Erin Maidan.
Conversation Starter ยท 4 hrs
For International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I'm posting this 1999 Courier story I did on a couple who came to Waterloo after World War II. He went to Dachau, she to Auschwitz. Miraculously, they were reunited and survived. Many family members didn't.
Never forget them. Never forget the liberators -- like David Sandvold, late president of Simpson Furniture in Cedar Falls, who helped liberate Mauthausen as a member of Gen. George S. Patton's U.S. Third Army.
Waterloo couple faced death and horrors of Auschwitz prison camp.
Publication date: 7/18/1999 Page: A1
By PAT KINNEY
Courier Business Editor
WATERLOO
When Sonia Maidan saw the chimney smoke billowing up into the sky, she knew she'd reached the final destination on a one-way ticket to hell.
The smoke was all that was visible from the narrow openings within the dark steaming furnace of a railroad boxcar, into which she was crammed with scores of other women. Their boxcar was one of a procession of boxcars similarly crammed with scores of other women.
"They kept all these cars very much closed and it was very hot," she said. "People were dying inside and it was so tightly packed with people that if someone died, they couldn't fall, because there was no place to fall."
Armed guards herded women out of the cars upon arrival. "They collected the women," and ordered them to strip naked, she said. "Everyone had to leave their clothes where they were standing. Then they took you in for a haircut, which was a hair shave. The women's heads were shaved.
"And then they were taken in to have a shower. Some were showers. Some of them were gas chambers," Maidan said. "It was just how lucky you were, whether you went right or left. You didn't know whether to the right was death, or to the left was death."
One man personally sorted through the women and decided whether an individual was sent "to the right" or "to the left."
It was 1944. The destination was Auschwitz. The chimney smoke was from incinerated corpses of gassed individuals. And the man who was selecting individuals for the showers or for the gas was Dr. Josef Mengele.
He became known as "The Angel of Death" to prisoners. Those "The Angel" spared from the gas or torture were sentenced to a living death, stripped of every vestige of self-respect and reduced to the lowest common denominator of human existence. "You lived to survive one day to the next" Maidan said, even one hour or one minute to the next.
Maidan and her husband Joe, who lived in Waterloo for more than 30 years after World War II and raised three children here, were both concentration camp survivors, persecuted by the Nazis like millions of others for their Jewish faith and heritage. They were driven from their home shortly after their marriage, following the German invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, which started World War II. They were separated for most of the war.
After living in the squalor and filth of the Warsaw ghetto, and working for a time in forced labor at a German ammunition factory at Radom in Poland, they were both sent to the death camps --- Joe to Dachau, Sonia to Auschwitz. They were miraculously reunited at war's end, after which they started their family. With a few exceptions, including Joe's sister Marie Weissalc, who also came to Waterloo and died in 1990, nearly everyone in their families of origin had been exterminated by the Nazis.
Joe, a tailor in Waterloo who owned J & M Clothiers at East Fifth and Syamore streets downtown, died in 1993 of heart failure at age 83. Sonia, now 78, lives in Boca Raton, Fla., near her daughter, Regina, who is active in Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, dedicated to preserving the histories of Holocaust survivors. And for Sonia, the memories, grief, anger, and guilt at having survived when so many others perished, never go away.
To her, the past 50 years have seemed like five, but the 5 1/2 before that seemed like an eternity. That terrible period began with the roar of German guns that ripped the Polish countryside and put the Maidans' small rural community and many others in the crosshairs of the Nazi blitzkrieg.
"All the towns were burning," recalled Sonia, who was 19 at the time. "There were bombs coming from all sides...We went out of town and went into farms. We tried to hide out there. It didn't take them long to take over. Hitler's army was big and strong and Poland's was no match. They were losing. The last was when they took Warsaw," the capital.
The Nazis began evacuating Jews from the small towns, "and took them into Warsaw and made a ghetto," Sonia recalled. "Of course, everyone was naive. They didn't know what was going to happen...They were shooting people, they were killing people, they were beating people all along. It was a very scary time."
The Nazis came for the Maidans' community, about 40 kilometers from Warsaw, in February 1941. They were transported by wagons. "It was cold and freezing and it seemed like a long time," she said. Their families were separated.
The Warsaw ghetto "was terrible, terrible," Sonia said. One had to find housing wherever one could, in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions. "There were outhouses. There were no bathrooms inside," she said, and "the Nazis were everywhere." About 500,000 Jews lived in the ghetto.
In 1942, the Nazis began rounding up people in the ghetto for the concentration camps, either for forced labor or for death. "They came into town and they had an order for everybody to be outside, and they meant it," Sonia said. "If they came into your house" to get you, "you were dead. They were shooting people. Everybody was scared."
They first took able-bodied young men to work at the ammunition factory in Radom; later, young women and young boys. "If you were 40 years old, they had no use for you," she said. "They took you to the death camp. You never got out of there. That's where the gas chambers were operating."
Sonia and her husband worked at the Radom factory until the fall of 1944, when "they dismissed the camp and took people on trains to Auschwitz, to Dachau," to the death camps.
It was at that time that Sonia has her brush with Mengele, who personally ordered 400,000 people to their deaths, according to historic accounts. Maidan figures now there was no rhyme or reason, other than luck, to why some were spared like herself, and others killed. But under Mengele's hand, some endured a death worse than gas.
"He was torturing people," Maidan said. "They were using machines. They put one leg on one side of this contraption, and the other leg on the other side. And then they stretched them and waited to see how long it would take for a person to tear apart, to tear in two."
Word of such torture spread through the camp from prisoners forced to work in those areas, Maidan said. While the full scope of Mengele's involvement in those and other atrocities wasn't known until after the war, Maidan remembers him well as the one selecting prisoners for life or death after she got off the train at Auschwitz. Mengele escaped prosecution for war crimes and died in Paraguay in South America in 1979. His death was not discovered until 1985, when his body, buried under an assumed name, was exhumed and verified to be his through dental records.
"What this man has done --- and people have tried to save his life, and saved him for so many years --- people are just...I don't know what to tell you, how people could have tried to save his life," Maidan said. "As far as any one of us (Holocaust survivors) was concerned, that man didn't deserve to live."
Children were brought from the ghetto and the forced-labor factories into the death camp as well. "The cleared the ghetto, cleared the towns, of the children and they were gassed," Maidan said. "Very few survived Auschwitz."
Maidan and the other prisoners also faced starvation. "They gave you a slice of bread and a bowl of soup that was almost all water" for a day's ration of food. "It was not enough to die from, but not enough to live on, either," she said.
"Auschwitz was not a work camp. All there was to do was you carried rocks from one place to the other. You always had to be very alert as to what was happening, how they got people together and put people together...If you faltered, you were dead." Auschwitz, located below some mountains, also was always cold, Maidan said, and prisoners only had one garment to wear, regardless of weather.
"When you're young, it has a terrible effect on you and when you're old, you just couldn't make it," she said.
Maidan saw the piles of exterminated corpses and all the horrors of the camp. "We saw everything," she said, "and you became sort of numb...You saw it with your own eyes, but you couldn't believe it was happening."
In July 1944, Maidan and other surviving prisoners were taken out of Auschwitz as the Germans retreated in the face of the advancing Soviet army. She and others were taken to Germany, again to work in ammunition factories in forced labor. She was at such a factory, in what later became West Germany, when she was one of 700 women liberated by elements of the U.S. Fifth Army on April 1, 1945.
"Nobody believed it was happening. We were standing around. We didn't know what to do. We thought if we ran they'd shoot you in the back; if you stood still they'd shoot you in the front." First the women saw planes, then heard tanks, but didn't know if they were Allied or German, she said. They also fooled the approaching Americans.
"They thought we were soldiers," she said. "It was a very rainy day. We were wearing the blankets we had, and the bowls we ate in we put over our heads, so they (the Americans) thought they were helmets. The tankers, the soldiers, came closer and saw we were all women and signaled (to the other troops) that we were just women prisoners."
"The people in the tanks were decent men," Sonia said, and put up all 700 women in housing in the nearby town, which the Germans had evacuated. The battle-weary soldiers weren't insensitive to the prisoners' plight, she said. Some of the Americans became physically sick when told what the concentration camp prisoners had endured.
Lists of survivors at different displaced persons camps were circulated, and Sonia found out Joe was alive. They were reunited three months later. Regina, their first child, was born in Munich in 1946.
"We applied for a visa to go to the United States," Sonia said. Poland was out of the question.
The young family was taken under the sponsorship of Sons of Jacob Synagogue and came to the United States and Waterloo in 1949. They were like "a stranger in a strange land," she said, but slowly, learned the language and became acquainted with people in the congregation and in the community.
Sonia, like a lot of concentration camp survivors, didn't feel elation at liberation. "They tell you you should feel elated, but you feel dead inside," she said. "You didn't know what in the hell has happened to you. Where is all the families? Where is all the people? They're all gone. And you just feel numb with a big hole in your stomach. You didn't know how to accept that freedom or what to do with it. There's relief that you're not scared, but that pain and suffering doesn't go away. It'll never go away. "
Grief comes too. "You grieve all the time; you don't stop," she said. "There is nothing that you can stop, or you can help. You see it all the time; you see what happened. The visual doesn't go away."
There is an active group of Holocaust survivors in Florida which Sonia regularly meets with; they share experiences and give each other support. She has recorded her experiences on videotape for the Grout Museum, and she supports Regina's Shoah Foundation Holocaust documentation work.
"We don't want it to happen again to anybody. It shouldn't," she said.
Conversation Starter ยท 4 hrs
For International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I'm posting this 1999 Courier story I did on a couple who came to Waterloo after World War II. He went to Dachau, she to Auschwitz. Miraculously, they were reunited and survived. Many family members didn't.
Never forget them. Never forget the liberators -- like David Sandvold, late president of Simpson Furniture in Cedar Falls, who helped liberate Mauthausen as a member of Gen. George S. Patton's U.S. Third Army.
Waterloo couple faced death and horrors of Auschwitz prison camp.
Publication date: 7/18/1999 Page: A1
By PAT KINNEY
Courier Business Editor
WATERLOO
When Sonia Maidan saw the chimney smoke billowing up into the sky, she knew she'd reached the final destination on a one-way ticket to hell.
The smoke was all that was visible from the narrow openings within the dark steaming furnace of a railroad boxcar, into which she was crammed with scores of other women. Their boxcar was one of a procession of boxcars similarly crammed with scores of other women.
"They kept all these cars very much closed and it was very hot," she said. "People were dying inside and it was so tightly packed with people that if someone died, they couldn't fall, because there was no place to fall."
Armed guards herded women out of the cars upon arrival. "They collected the women," and ordered them to strip naked, she said. "Everyone had to leave their clothes where they were standing. Then they took you in for a haircut, which was a hair shave. The women's heads were shaved.
"And then they were taken in to have a shower. Some were showers. Some of them were gas chambers," Maidan said. "It was just how lucky you were, whether you went right or left. You didn't know whether to the right was death, or to the left was death."
One man personally sorted through the women and decided whether an individual was sent "to the right" or "to the left."
It was 1944. The destination was Auschwitz. The chimney smoke was from incinerated corpses of gassed individuals. And the man who was selecting individuals for the showers or for the gas was Dr. Josef Mengele.
He became known as "The Angel of Death" to prisoners. Those "The Angel" spared from the gas or torture were sentenced to a living death, stripped of every vestige of self-respect and reduced to the lowest common denominator of human existence. "You lived to survive one day to the next" Maidan said, even one hour or one minute to the next.
Maidan and her husband Joe, who lived in Waterloo for more than 30 years after World War II and raised three children here, were both concentration camp survivors, persecuted by the Nazis like millions of others for their Jewish faith and heritage. They were driven from their home shortly after their marriage, following the German invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, which started World War II. They were separated for most of the war.
After living in the squalor and filth of the Warsaw ghetto, and working for a time in forced labor at a German ammunition factory at Radom in Poland, they were both sent to the death camps --- Joe to Dachau, Sonia to Auschwitz. They were miraculously reunited at war's end, after which they started their family. With a few exceptions, including Joe's sister Marie Weissalc, who also came to Waterloo and died in 1990, nearly everyone in their families of origin had been exterminated by the Nazis.
Joe, a tailor in Waterloo who owned J & M Clothiers at East Fifth and Syamore streets downtown, died in 1993 of heart failure at age 83. Sonia, now 78, lives in Boca Raton, Fla., near her daughter, Regina, who is active in Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, dedicated to preserving the histories of Holocaust survivors. And for Sonia, the memories, grief, anger, and guilt at having survived when so many others perished, never go away.
To her, the past 50 years have seemed like five, but the 5 1/2 before that seemed like an eternity. That terrible period began with the roar of German guns that ripped the Polish countryside and put the Maidans' small rural community and many others in the crosshairs of the Nazi blitzkrieg.
"All the towns were burning," recalled Sonia, who was 19 at the time. "There were bombs coming from all sides...We went out of town and went into farms. We tried to hide out there. It didn't take them long to take over. Hitler's army was big and strong and Poland's was no match. They were losing. The last was when they took Warsaw," the capital.
The Nazis began evacuating Jews from the small towns, "and took them into Warsaw and made a ghetto," Sonia recalled. "Of course, everyone was naive. They didn't know what was going to happen...They were shooting people, they were killing people, they were beating people all along. It was a very scary time."
The Nazis came for the Maidans' community, about 40 kilometers from Warsaw, in February 1941. They were transported by wagons. "It was cold and freezing and it seemed like a long time," she said. Their families were separated.
The Warsaw ghetto "was terrible, terrible," Sonia said. One had to find housing wherever one could, in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions. "There were outhouses. There were no bathrooms inside," she said, and "the Nazis were everywhere." About 500,000 Jews lived in the ghetto.
In 1942, the Nazis began rounding up people in the ghetto for the concentration camps, either for forced labor or for death. "They came into town and they had an order for everybody to be outside, and they meant it," Sonia said. "If they came into your house" to get you, "you were dead. They were shooting people. Everybody was scared."
They first took able-bodied young men to work at the ammunition factory in Radom; later, young women and young boys. "If you were 40 years old, they had no use for you," she said. "They took you to the death camp. You never got out of there. That's where the gas chambers were operating."
Sonia and her husband worked at the Radom factory until the fall of 1944, when "they dismissed the camp and took people on trains to Auschwitz, to Dachau," to the death camps.
It was at that time that Sonia has her brush with Mengele, who personally ordered 400,000 people to their deaths, according to historic accounts. Maidan figures now there was no rhyme or reason, other than luck, to why some were spared like herself, and others killed. But under Mengele's hand, some endured a death worse than gas.
"He was torturing people," Maidan said. "They were using machines. They put one leg on one side of this contraption, and the other leg on the other side. And then they stretched them and waited to see how long it would take for a person to tear apart, to tear in two."
Word of such torture spread through the camp from prisoners forced to work in those areas, Maidan said. While the full scope of Mengele's involvement in those and other atrocities wasn't known until after the war, Maidan remembers him well as the one selecting prisoners for life or death after she got off the train at Auschwitz. Mengele escaped prosecution for war crimes and died in Paraguay in South America in 1979. His death was not discovered until 1985, when his body, buried under an assumed name, was exhumed and verified to be his through dental records.
"What this man has done --- and people have tried to save his life, and saved him for so many years --- people are just...I don't know what to tell you, how people could have tried to save his life," Maidan said. "As far as any one of us (Holocaust survivors) was concerned, that man didn't deserve to live."
Children were brought from the ghetto and the forced-labor factories into the death camp as well. "The cleared the ghetto, cleared the towns, of the children and they were gassed," Maidan said. "Very few survived Auschwitz."
Maidan and the other prisoners also faced starvation. "They gave you a slice of bread and a bowl of soup that was almost all water" for a day's ration of food. "It was not enough to die from, but not enough to live on, either," she said.
"Auschwitz was not a work camp. All there was to do was you carried rocks from one place to the other. You always had to be very alert as to what was happening, how they got people together and put people together...If you faltered, you were dead." Auschwitz, located below some mountains, also was always cold, Maidan said, and prisoners only had one garment to wear, regardless of weather.
"When you're young, it has a terrible effect on you and when you're old, you just couldn't make it," she said.
Maidan saw the piles of exterminated corpses and all the horrors of the camp. "We saw everything," she said, "and you became sort of numb...You saw it with your own eyes, but you couldn't believe it was happening."
In July 1944, Maidan and other surviving prisoners were taken out of Auschwitz as the Germans retreated in the face of the advancing Soviet army. She and others were taken to Germany, again to work in ammunition factories in forced labor. She was at such a factory, in what later became West Germany, when she was one of 700 women liberated by elements of the U.S. Fifth Army on April 1, 1945.
"Nobody believed it was happening. We were standing around. We didn't know what to do. We thought if we ran they'd shoot you in the back; if you stood still they'd shoot you in the front." First the women saw planes, then heard tanks, but didn't know if they were Allied or German, she said. They also fooled the approaching Americans.
"They thought we were soldiers," she said. "It was a very rainy day. We were wearing the blankets we had, and the bowls we ate in we put over our heads, so they (the Americans) thought they were helmets. The tankers, the soldiers, came closer and saw we were all women and signaled (to the other troops) that we were just women prisoners."
"The people in the tanks were decent men," Sonia said, and put up all 700 women in housing in the nearby town, which the Germans had evacuated. The battle-weary soldiers weren't insensitive to the prisoners' plight, she said. Some of the Americans became physically sick when told what the concentration camp prisoners had endured.
Lists of survivors at different displaced persons camps were circulated, and Sonia found out Joe was alive. They were reunited three months later. Regina, their first child, was born in Munich in 1946.
"We applied for a visa to go to the United States," Sonia said. Poland was out of the question.
The young family was taken under the sponsorship of Sons of Jacob Synagogue and came to the United States and Waterloo in 1949. They were like "a stranger in a strange land," she said, but slowly, learned the language and became acquainted with people in the congregation and in the community.
Sonia, like a lot of concentration camp survivors, didn't feel elation at liberation. "They tell you you should feel elated, but you feel dead inside," she said. "You didn't know what in the hell has happened to you. Where is all the families? Where is all the people? They're all gone. And you just feel numb with a big hole in your stomach. You didn't know how to accept that freedom or what to do with it. There's relief that you're not scared, but that pain and suffering doesn't go away. It'll never go away. "
Grief comes too. "You grieve all the time; you don't stop," she said. "There is nothing that you can stop, or you can help. You see it all the time; you see what happened. The visual doesn't go away."
There is an active group of Holocaust survivors in Florida which Sonia regularly meets with; they share experiences and give each other support. She has recorded her experiences on videotape for the Grout Museum, and she supports Regina's Shoah Foundation Holocaust documentation work.
"We don't want it to happen again to anybody. It shouldn't," she said.
