The train finally came to a stop. All the people were packed in so tightly in the cattle car that they were barely able to move, having been deprived of even the most basic fundamental needs like food, water and sanitation for this long and arduous trip. Paula, a young, Jewish, red-headed teenager by this time had become a mere shell of her former self, managing somehow to survive Nazi concentration camps for about 2 years. When the doors to the train cars sprang open you could hear all of the shouting and the chaos as the soldiers began screaming instructions. People who didn’t move quickly were beaten, some were shot, but the commands were fairly simple either go to the left or to the right. The ones who were told to go to the left were never seen again. But they may have been the lucky ones, because the ones that were told to go to the right were destined to years of hard work, malnutrition and slavery. When Paula jumped off that train she had no idea that she had now just set foot in Auschwitz where about 3 million Jews would perish. At that moment she had a fifty percent chance of surviving as her destiny laid completely in the hands of the soldier assigned to her car. She was told to go the right where the prisoners walked to a large room.
When the women arrived at this room they were told to take all of their clothes off, to which not one lady objected to this humiliation because they had already been so completely stripped of any human dignity. Before Paula disrobed she grabbed the locket with her mother’s picture she had carried for about two years and held it firmly in her hand. Her world had been completely transformed from living in a happy and secure middle-class German family to a living nightmare almost overnight. The last time she saw her family, her mother secretly slipped the locket into her pocket without her knowledge. Now this was the last thing that Paula had in this world. She didn’t care about being naked in front of the soldiers, she didn’t care about being called by a number instead of her name, or being beaten or being starved to death. And by now she didn’t care if she lived or died. But the one thing that she was determined about was that she would rather die than give up the locket.
When the soldier noticed that her fist was still clenched, he yelled for her to open her hand. She ignored his commands. He began to whip and beat her while screaming at her to open her hand, but Paula was fully resolved to go to her grave that day with her mother’s picture held firmly in her hand.
I sat in the audience completely mesmerized as this elderly lady’s vivid descriptions took me by the spirit into the past. In my mind’s eye I could see this scene playing out through her eyes as she finally fell to the ground and the locket toppled from her hand bouncing in slow motion across the floor. The soldier was now kicking her as he continued to scream at her to open her hand, yet his voice seemed to fade into the distance as Paula watched her greatest possession bounce across the floor. And yet she remained steadfastly determined to reach back out and grab that locket. But the locket finally stopped, her mother’s picture looking straight up at her and the elderly Paula said,
I could hear my mother’s voice at that time saying, ‘Live Paula, choose life, and live’
In the audience that day, the elderly Paula continued to take me by the spirit into her past. I saw her loving family. I saw her doing homework with the neighbor’s German son who would deny knowing her at the very first train departure. I saw the beatings, humiliations and the rapes of young women by their Nazi oppressors. But she also shared with us the few who gave her the resolve to transcend this nightmare, like the German commander that called her his Paula because she reminded him of his daughter and he would slip her some additional bread and continued to tell her that she must live so that she could tell the world of these atrocities.
In the final scene Paula was taken to peel potatoes. These starving women began to stuff their mouths full of the potato peelings. The guards beat them unconscious. She sat for the next year or so on a stool with lice in her hair, peeling potatoes for 16 hours a day on a stool with barely enough food to subsist.
The last day that she was in this camp she heard a huge commotion. All of the sudden the doors burst open and soldiers ran into the kitchen yelling, “We are the U.S. Army.” The women who had been sitting on those stools were so happy they tried to get off of their stools to hug the soldiers, but when they got up they were so weak they just fell to the ground and hugged their boots and cried.
Through all of this Paula has miraculously managed keep a loving outlook on people. By the time she ended her testimony there was a waterfall of tears behind my eyes. I knew that if I let one tear out that the dam that was holding back all of the rest would open like a floodgate. Inside my heart had completely melted for this woman whose every fiber emitted love for people. It’s difficult to comprehend how she could not have grown bitter and resentful for these terrible injustices, but she ended her testimony with,
Ladies and gentleman, we should all just love one another.
This is something that Paula used to overcome her trials. Her life is a witness to how love can overcome evil and light can transcend darkness.
** This is an excerpt from her testimony at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, MI, organized by Shalom Ministry. You can read more about this visit on Shalom’s May 2010 Newsletter.
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