Yom HaShoah Ve-Hagevurah —the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism — begins the evening of April 17, and this year it will mark 80 years since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on April 19, 1943.

Yom HaShoah is a day on which we commemorate the 6 million, honor the Shoah’s survivors, and pay tribute to the heroic actions of Jewish resisters, Righteous Gentiles and others who stood up to the madness of Nazism.

Throughout the years, J. has interviewed many Holocaust survivors  and partisans who ended up living in the Bay Area. Many were part of a two-year J. series starting in 2020, “Honoring the Survivors,” making for some gripping and important reading. Here, we provide short but powerful snippets of testimony from 10 of those interviews.

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Edith Heine

Edith was just 2 years old when the Germans invaded her hometown of Amsterdam in 1940. Her parents, staunch anti-Nazi activists, had fled Germany to the Netherlands in the early 1930s, but after the Nazis arrived, the family was forced to go underground and stay on the move. Edith’s testimony includes her earliest memories, including a Gestapo raid at her home, her family’s flight and how they hid in several places during the war years. Edith, who lives in El Sobrante, also recorded 3½ hours in 1995 as part of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Oral History project.

Read: “East Bay Holocaust survivor, 83, shares history through a child’s eyes”

Watch: Oral history interview with Edith Heine

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Rena Victor

Rena was only 4 when she lived through one of the most destructive aerial attacks of World War II — the Allied bombing of Hamburg in 1943, known as “Operation Gomorrah,” which killed tens of thousands of people. She survived the Holocaust hidden on a farm with her mother and sisters, in constant fear of being sent to the camps. At one point, her family hid in a bunker. Rena, who lives in San Rafael, provides testimony that includes what it was like to go through the Holocaust with a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father, and how the family stayed in the home of a Nazi who didn’t know her family was Jewish.

Read:  “Rena Victor, 80, recounts surviving Holocaust and bombing of Hamburg”

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George Sarlo

George was 4 when his father disappeared and was taken to a Hungarian forced labor camp in 1942, and never heard from again. For several years, the youngster and his family managed to move around to evade deportation by the Nazis, but his extended family wasn’t as lucky. None of them survived. Eventually, George’s sister was able to convince the Spanish consulate to give documentation and passports to the family, which saved them.

George’s testimony details his time in Budapest during the Holocaust, his participation in the Hungarian uprising in 1956, his escape to the U.S. after the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and how he used psychedelics to process trauma. The San Francisco resident recorded more than 1½ hours in 1990 as part of the USHMM’s Oral History project.

Read: “Psychedelic journeys brought peace to this Holocaust survivor. Now he’s helping others on their own journeys.”

Watch: Oral history interview with George Sarlo

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Leon Rajninger

Leon was 10 when Romania joined Hitler in 1941. He and his family were rounded up with the rest of the Jews in Romania and sent on a brutal death march to a concentration camp; fortunately for his family, they fell to the end of the line and were able to bribe a Romanian soldier so they could escape. But that was just the beginning of his harrowing experiences.

The testimony of Leon, who lives in San Francisco, recounts his four days aboard a boxcar headed to a death camp, fleeing to a ghetto in Ukraine, nearly starving to death, surviving only by eating snow, contracting typhus and being mistaken for dead.

Read: “S.F. man, 88, recalls a ‘nightmare’ at every turn”

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Herbert Heller, z”l

Herbert, who lived in Novato before his death in 2021, was 10 when the Germans invaded his hometown of Prague, and 15 when he came face-to-face with the “angel of death,” Dr. Mengele, at Auschwitz. His quick action and ability to speak German kept him out of the gas chamber, but the horrors of the Holocaust had a lasting effect — so much so that he kept his experiences secret until 2004, when he recorded nearly 2 hours of testimony as part of the USHMM’s Oral History project. His testimony included his account of being in two concentration camps, escaping during a death march in 1945 and burning off his Auschwitz number tattoo while hiding with a Catholic family.

Read: “Quick thinking saved this North Bay man’s life during Holocaust”

Watch: Oral history interview with Herbert Heller

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Misia Olsak Nudler, z”l

Misia was 12 when World War II started in 1939 with invasion of Poland by Germany in the west and the Soviet Union in the east. Her village about 60 miles from Warsaw ended up on the Russian side. A longtime resident of Oakland who lived at the Reutlinger Community in Danville before her death last October, Misia provided testimony that recalled how her family hosted Jews who had fled the German side, the bomb that fell on her home, living in the Ciechanowiec ghetto, her time on the run with her sister when they hid in wheat fields, and their eventual journey through the mountains into Czechoslovakia and then to a displaced persons camp in Germany.

Read: “Holocaust survivor, 93, recalls horrors, close scrapes — and a new life in Oakland”

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Helen Fixler

Helen estimates that she was 14 when the Nazis invaded her home of Młynów, as it’s known in Polish, now called Mlyniv in northwest Ukraine. Her family left everything behind in their escape from the Nazis, and the war years that followed were so traumatizing that many of her memories were obscured, causing her to be unsure of her exact age. Her testimony details her time in the Młynów ghetto, her family’s escape, hiding in a hole in the forest, hiding in a barn (and often in a haystack) for eight months, running from Ukrainian gunfire and caring for her father’s wounds while in hiding. In 1989, with her husband, Leo, the Oakland resident recorded more than an hour as part of the USHMM’s Oral History project.

Read: “She spent the war in hiding, from a forest bunker to a haystack”

Watch: Oral history interview with Leo Fixler and Helen Fixler

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Hilda Namm, z”l

Hilda was a teenager when she and her family, who owned a fabric store in Berlin, survived the 1938 Nazi rampage known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. As German Jews, she recalled, they were “stateless citizens” who were able to flee only to Shanghai, one of the few places in the world that did not require a visa for entry at the time. Hilda, who lived in Larkspur, died last December. Her testimony detailed her nine years in China, what it was like living in the Shanghai Ghetto and her life after immigrating to San Francisco.

Read:  “A post-Kristallnacht escape by ‘the bravest person I know’”

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Zdenka Ruchwarger Levy, z”l

Zdenka, who lived at the Moldaw Residences in Palo Alto before her death in January 2022, was 15 when Germany invaded her home of Zagreb, Croatia (which was then Yugoslavia). Her family and other Jews were forced to gather at a fairgrounds, where many women were raped and abused.

Her father was sent to Jasenovac, a concentration camp known to be among the most brutal in all of Europe. Zdenka’s testimony described her experiences escaping to Italy with her brother, being held in an Italian prison and then an Italian concentration camp, and eventually immigrating to the U.S.

Read: “Zdenka’s story of WWII survival in Croatia and Italy: ‘Others had it worse’”

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Joseph Pell, z”l

Joseph was 15 when World War II broke out. His family fled their hometown of Biala Podlaska in eastern Poland and, like many other Poles trying to escape the Nazis, resettled in the Soviet-occupied province of Volhynia. However, the area eventually fell under Nazi control. Joseph’s testimony described his experiences surviving pogroms and mass killings, fleeing from Ukrainian authorities and fighting in the partisan resistance. Originally named Yosel Epelbaum, Joseph lived in San Rafael and died in December 2020.

Read: “Joseph Pell, 95, reflects on a life of struggle and triumph”