photo:patricia villers Elizabeth Deutsch, a survivor of the Holocaust, speaks to students at Ansonia High School May 29.
Now 87, Deutsch as a child lived through one of the most infamous crimes in human history — the attempted extermination of the Jewish people by Nazi Germany in World War II.
On Friday (May 29) Deutsch shared her story with students at Ansonia High School.
Born in Hungary, Deutsch was 12 when the war broke out.
Her family enjoyed a simple life — there was no running water or electricity, and they got around by horse and carriage.
The town was about 3,500 people, 700 of whom were Jewish.
“We got along so good with our Christian neighbors,” Deutsch, the youngest of five children, said. “We had no problems whatsoever.”
That would change.
Hungary at the time was nominally an independent country, but relied on Nazi Germany and fascist Italy economically. It joined Hitler’s “Axis” alliance in 1940.
“In 1941 they started to take the young Jewish men (in our town) and they took my three brothers,” Deutsch said. “In 1942 they took my father, too.”
More onerous restrictions were imposed on the country’s Jewish citizens, Deutsch recalled.
“We had to wear a yellow star on our clothes,” she said. “We didn’t leave the house and we had to darken our windows so the light wouldn’t go out.”
The family trudged to food ration lines daily. News was also hard to come by — the family had no radio, “and in the newspaper they did not say much.”
Still, they got by as best they could — until March 1944.
Deutsch said that toward the end of that month, a neighbor knocked on the family’s door on a Saturday night and told them “all Jewish people had to get ready by Monday morning and go to the synagogue.”
Deutsch said they could only bring what they could carry.
“We didn’t sleep,” she said, because they didn’t know where they were going to go. “We wore more underwear and more than one dress, so that we didn’t have to carry it in our hands.”
“Walking up the street with the other Jewish people was a very sad sight. The elderly people were put on a horse and wagon,” Deutsch said. “I saw my grandmother’s brothers and sisters go by. It was so sad. When we got to the synagogue most of the people were there already. We were crying we didn’t know what would happen to us.”
They were brought to a Jewish ghetto in a nearby city, sleeping in cramped quarters on the floors of houses seized by the Nazis.
What Deutsch and her family didn’t know at the time — far worse deprivations would follow.
That May, the Nazis began to empty the ghetto.
Deutsch and her family members were locked in a cattle car with scores of others.
The Nazis gave them a pail of water to share — “and an empty pail for sanitary reasons.”
The train stopped at Auschwitz-Birkenau, an infamous concentration and extermination camp built by the Nazis in Poland.
More than 1 million people died at the camp during the Holocaust. The Nazis would kill a total of about 6 million Jews during the war — including Deutsch’s parents and brothers.
On the day she arrived at the camp, Deutsch said she was greeted by a pile of corpses so high it “looked like a mountain.”
The train got so close to the gas chambers where Jews were exterminated, she said, that “we could hear the screaming and doors slamming.”
Deutsch and her sister Frieda, who was nine years older, were separated from the rest of her family.
“There was no food, and those in charge were selecting people to work,” she said.
Deutsch worked in a warehouse, and later she and her sister had to dig ditches.
They ate grass to survive — but they survived.
The Germans next took them — again, by cattle car — to Braunschweig, a bombed-out city in Germany. They lived in a horse stable, Deutsch said, sleeping on hay.
They were brought to another labor camp and told to get into an elevator that descended down a salt mine.
The elevator door opened to reveal German SS soldiers who put them to work at an underground munitions factory.
After a while she and her sister were locked into a cattle car for two weeks.
When the train stopped they had arrived in a forest in the area of Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Germany.
The SS officers made them stand in rows and then all lie down.
Deutsch and her sister hugged and said a prayer.
But the Germans had other priorities besides killing — for once.
“The SS men and their dogs were running away,” Deutsch said. “They left their machine guns there.”
It was May 2, 1945. Hitler had killed himself April 30. All German armed forces would surrender unconditionally May 7.
Deutsch and her sister were eventually rescued by the International Red Cross.
After the war they lived in Denmark, then Sweden for five years before leaving for the United States in 1950 to live with cousins in Bridgeport.
Deutsch studied to become a hairdresser, married, and had two children.
But she will never forget the pain and suffering of what she, her family and millions others like hers endured during World War II.
She wrote a poem, “Wound That Never Heals,” that she read for students Friday, her voice the only sound breaking the pin-drop silence of the high school’s auditorium:
Junior David Perez sat in the front row of the auditorium for the presentation, and went up to Deutsch afterward to thank her.
“It was moving,” he said of the talk. “We’re studying the Holocaust in U.S. History and it’s hard to believe (what happened). Seeing the perspective of someone who went through it brought history to life.”
Deutsch is featured in a group of Holocaust survivors at www.nevertoforget.org, a website dedicated to sharing the stories of survivors so that the horror will never be repeated.
Click here to read more about her life.
