On Jan. 27, 1945, Soviet troops overran Auschwitz.
For Linda Breder, it feels like yesterday.
“You know, the feelings, I see it in front of me. So, the 60th anniversary of the liberation, to celebrate, is something I appreciate. But for me, what I have been through, my whole family killed and I am the only survivor among five children. It really seems like it happened yesterday,” said the San Francisco survivor.
The notion that 60 long years have passed since those dark days “makes me appreciate love. And that we are here. But, looking back, I have to pinch myself that I am here. I have my family. I have two children, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.”
Along with thousands of other Auschwitz survivors, Breder, one of several Bay Area residents interviewed for this story, was not at the camp to greet the Red Army. On Jan. 18, all the inmates deemed healthy enough to support themselves were rounded up and sent on forced death marches away from the rampaging Soviets. Many were killed or died of exhaustion along the way.
In the days and weeks leading up to her expulsion, Breder had marveled at the Soviet planes soaring overhead. She wasn’t the only one who noticed.
“The S.S. guard said don’t be happy you see the airplanes coming over Auschwitz. Your freedom will only be through the chimney. Or you will be blown up,” she recalled.
The concept of liberation was also but a dream for Gloria Hollander Lyon.
“We heard artillery fire in the forest. Almost every day we heard artillery fire. To us, it meant perhaps the Germans were practicing, not that we were here to be liberated,” recalled the 75-year-old San Franciscan.
“That would have been music to our ears.”
The formal, international recognition of the camp’s liberation struck Bay Area Auschwitz survivors as bittersweet.
“We could perish, 6 million of us, nobody caring about us,” said San Rafael’s Berta Kohut. “Where were these people 60 years ago?”
Oakland’s Lucille Eichengreen has a simple answer for that question — they weren’t born yet.
“That is like blaming the German children nowadays. Their fathers, grandfathers, they are the ones we are to blame,” she said.
“That [world leaders] now go, I think it is a politically correct thing to do. It is no more, no less. Where were they 60 years ago? Where was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to make it very personal.”
Eichengreen will attend ceremonies later this year in Germany marking the liberation of Bergen-Belsen at the behest of German television, and San Francisco’s William Lowenberg will attend upcoming Auschwitz events.
Six decades after escaping the living hell that has become the personification of human cruelty, local survivors say they are still haunted by society’s savagery and ignorance.
“People still don’t get it. Or they are not interested in it. Slowly, it seems to me, everything will die. I don’t think we will be commemorated like the Jews of Egypt,” said Breder.
Added Eichengreen, “If I walk through the Polish city of Lodz now and see the anti-Semitic slogans that existed when my parents were children, that they exist now is unthinkable. And they do. In great numbers.”
The most recent signal of world ignorance came when Great Britain’s Prince Harry was photographed wearing a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party.
But the local survivors interviewed viewed the incident not only as victims of Nazi atrocities but as mothers who had raised teenage sons and daughters.
“He is not very intelligent, this young man. But teenagers do many things that are not right,” said Kohut.
“I don’t think it’s because he’s a Nazi. He’s a stupid teenager. That’s what he is.”
Lyon notes that “little Harry” may have done us all a favor by “opening everyone’s eyes to what is still going on in the world.”
And, even 60 years later, Auschwitz survivors’ pain has not been dulled.
Kohut and Breder are lifelong friends, and chat often.
“We speak about many things,” said Kohut, “But we end, always, in the camp.”
For Lyon, the endless nightmare is still “so clear.”
She recounted the time when, during her job sorting the clothes of gassed inmates, she came across her aunt and uncle’s handmade suit and dress.
“And I knew then [they] were no longer alive. Of course, they were murdered. With their three children,” she said.
“So, how can one forget?”
Liberated:
60 years after Auschwitz