2008 Woodie Awards
Survivor speaks about life in concentration camps
Speaker lived with 600 others, witnessed wagon hauling bodies
Rebecca Vetter
- Page 1 of 2 next >
|
As soon as Lazan arrived, though, the crowd quieted as she told her experience of being a young girl in a concentration camp.
"Mine is a story that Anne Frank might have told if she had lived," Lazan said.
Starting off with the Nuremberg Laws, Lazan told of her experiences from the Kristallnacht to her life today.
Lazan said when she was four years old and things started to get bad for Jewish people in Holland, the place where she lived, her parents decided to go to America.
One month before their departure to America, the Germans invaded Holland and her family was taken to another place to live, Lazan said.
"We lived a very dull, stagnant life," Lazan said. "Just years before my father had been awarded and iron cross for his military service in World War I."
In 1944, when she was nine years old, her family was shipped out to a concentration camp and could only bring with them one knapsack, Lazan said.
Lazan said she lived in a place with 600 other people made for 100 but was able to share her bunk with her mother instead of a stranger.
Lazan said one day a wagon came by carrying what she thought was firewood but was really dead, naked bodies thrown on top of each other.
"There were no trees, flowers or any blades of grass," Lazan said. "Once a month we were taken to get showers but we were never sure whether water or gas would come out."
Although everyone has seen, heard, read and watched documentaries on the Holocaust, nothing can describe the smell and fear of death surrounding Jewish people. Lazan said.
"Bodies could not be taken away fast enough," she said. "There is no way this could be put accurately into words."
Lazan said in April 1945 she and her family were among 2,500 people on the third transport to an extermination camp without food for two weeks straight.
Be the first to comment on this story