- My mother and sister and I were sitting at home listening to the radio.

My mother was scared because she knew something was happening.

And that was called Krystallnacht, the breaking of glass.

And it's when the Germans took over all the Jewish businesses and just took over everything that belonged to the Jews.

(somber music) And I could tell how terrified my mother was.

I just knew things weren't good.

But I do remember that evening.

I don't know why, all my life, it just stood out.

- It was the most frightening night.

We had to leave everything behind and they plundered.

You know, they went in our house, stole what they could.

We didn't know where we were going to be taken.

We walked from our house to the next town where they gathered other Jews.

And I was 10 years old then, right?

Yes.

- We were warned by one of the neighbors upstairs to get out of the house, and the school was a block away.

And we saw smoke coming out of the school.

Temple was burned totally to the ground.

I remember this too.

What will school be like tomorrow?

Will there be school tomorrow?

No more school after that.

School was over.

My concern was how about my mama and daddy in Camberg?

How did they do?

What happened to them?

- The war broke out in my town.

And one evening, somebody came running and knock on the door and he said, "Something is going on in our town.

I want you to be prepared."

So my father thanked him and closed the door.

We Jewish people have it's called the mezuzah.

So my dad, he turned around and said to us, "I would love you to all of you to kiss the mezuzah, because I don't think we ever gonna come back anymore to our home."

Of course, we start walking.

Where do you walk?

It start being late.

Nasty.

And you could've hear the planes.

Me as a little child could've hear the planes flying over our head.

- The next morning, seeing the German flags all over our little town and see German troops, SS troops marching back and forth.

It was just scary.

(somber music continues) - The thing that I remember is that dramatic change that happened practically overnight when Hitler came to power.

And it was precipitated not necessarily by laws, not necessarily by dictums, but by, quote, "the formation of Hitler Youth."

I was the only boy in my class that was Jewish.

I was the only boy who did not wear a Hitler Youth uniform.

That made me different.

Things in Camberg in school became so uncomfortable for me, and apparently I must have really complained, but I know I was not comfortable in the surroundings in school.

- It wasn't pleasant to go to school.

I was scared.

The children called me already "dirty Jew."

And I couldn't go to public school anymore.

And I went to private school, was run by nuns in Euskirchen.

It was about, I would say, 30 miles away from my hometown.

They took us so we could further our education.

It was most important to us.

(soft music) - My mother and sister and I went and then we stayed at this professor Meinhardt, who was one of my mother's teachers at the Conservatory of Music.

We stayed at his house and that lasted, I think, like three months.

Then we went from Vienna to Lithuania by train.

So I think it took several days.

My mother and sister and I, we just had basically clothes on our back.

- You know, I don't recall a precise moment that I learned about my dad's family history and their escape from the Holocaust.

It was always sort of a part of who we are and what we were.

In Selma at that time, there was a fairly thriving Jewish community and everybody had a story to tell.

A lot of my dad's mother's family had not made it out and that my dad was fortunate to get out and he always spoke very fondly and patriotically of the United States, a place that gave them haven.

But neither he nor my grandmother ever talked much about what happened back in Austria before they left.

I knew the name of the ship they came over on.

I knew that the history of their departure from Europe at the time that they were trying to get out, each country in Europe had its own quota for US immigration and Austria's quota had already been filled.

So the only reason they were able to get out was that my grandmother still had her Lithuanian citizenship.

My dad has just sort of rolled with the flow.

And whether that's a result of his experiences in escaping the Holocaust or whether it's just all one continuum, I don't know.

- England passed the law very soon after Kristallnacht that said, send us your children.

We will see to it that they get an education and that they will be taken care of.

And that literally was the Kindertransport.

Under that same law, my uncle saw to it that I went from Frankfurt to a Jewish boarding school in England.

- You know, I don't remember when I knew that he had gone to England even.

That was never even really discussed.

You know, I guess if you didn't have a background in the Holocaust, you don't know questions to ask.

And this is just your norm.

And I think that until I began the work that I was doing, I mean, even in high school, I learned very little about the Holocaust, but I didn't put two and two together.

It wasn't really until I started working with the Holocaust Center or actually before that, when I started teaching a class on the Holocaust, that I began to ask him questions.

You know, I knew as an adult he had nightmares and his nightmares are of Nazis chasing him.

The fear that he lived under and that obviously had a very deep-seated effect on him.

And that he vividly describes that relief coming out of the country.

So there was obvious, this outward oppressive feel until that point in time, until he was 12 years old.

And that's a large amount of time.

- When you get to the border, remember to you now, you were told how many handkerchiefs you can carry with you, how many underwear you can carry with you, how many shoes you can have.

You are inspected by the Germans on one side of the border in uniform, in abrupt voices.

And they look at you and they look at your list.

They open the suitcases up and so forth.

They say that, "All right, you pass."

Then the train starts up again.

They go, choo, choo, choo, choo, choo.

And you go to the next stop.

Next stop is the Dutch.

Dutch, "Good morning.

Hope everybody's well.

Welcome to Holland."

It's a totally different existence.

You've come from hell.

You're coming to somebody who recognizes you as an individual.

- We all gathered in Amsterdam in the Shoah house, all the Jews, and that's when everybody, oh, I mean, people started to go in hiding.

- What happened then with Holland was that when her father left, the family followed and it was a good place for them to be until war broke out between Germany and England or the rest of Europe.

(somber music) And they bombed Rotterdam and the papers for them to leave, the following days, weeks, I'm not sure exactly, but it was a very short period of time, were destroyed.

And that's what kept Mom and her family there, where her cousin had already left.

- See, the night-- - The night before you were supposed to go.

- Yes.

And my father was then already interned and there was something wrong with the papers and we couldn't leave.

So that's how we got stuck in Holland.

- We didn't grow up with this cloud hanging over our head because our parents were immigrants and because they had suffered the way they had.

They didn't talk about it.

The only thing we knew about it was that, you know, Mom had numbers on her arm.

- [Ruth] I still have my numbers.

- There it is, right there.

- But it was coming into Auschwitz Birkenau that we lost all our papers and all our papers and everything.

So they were such big numbers, so they couldn't had enough room for the numbers.

So they started with A and B. So we were on A2792.

My sister and my mother, we were on one after the other.

- Our clothes was filthy already, start getting filthy.

And we came to the forest.

And of course, the bombs were flying.

We could have seen them.

Then we realize there is something really bad going on, as children.

- My parents never really spoke about the Holocaust and the atrocities that they went through when we were younger.

We knew that they had been through the Holocaust.

My father had lost his entire family.

So, you know, it was always questionable because we were blessed to have my grandparents and aunts and uncles from my mother's side.

So they told us a little bit, but not their entire story.

And when I came to Birmingham visiting, I said I was gonna go and listen to my parents speak.

And it was at a church one evening.

And I sat in the very front row and I was listening to my father tell his story.

Well, he told his entire story.

And I just remember that feeling of, oh my God, you know.

I had really no idea of what they went through, what they saw until I heard them speak.

- My grandparents, the second set, lived in a place.

It's called Chotin.

So my dad said to Mama, "Maybe we can make it be safe and they're not going to get us.

Maybe we going to try to somehow to make it to Chotin.

Maybe they're not there."

Guess what, my dear friends?

We never made it.

We came to the end of the forest.

They surrounded us with the tanks, with the German dogs.

They ripped us apart.

I was holding on to my mother's skirt.

My younger brother Mark was holding on to the other side.

They took my father.

They threw him away to the side.

They took my brother.

They took him to another side.

They ripped us off of my mother.

They didn't let us go.

So they took the bayonets and start beating her up almost to death.

And they took us apart completely from each other.

So some they gave out the yellow star, the number, and fortunately God wanted me to survive.

My number came.

They put me in that side that I was not going to be killed.

And they took us to a place and they told us we are gonna march to the train station.

They always said that they going to take us to a better place.

(somber music) - And we had to get off the train from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz.

It was a short time.

We were the second transport that was shipped out of Theresienstadt to Auschwitz.

- That was not a regular train.

It was a train that they carried cows, pigs.

It was awful.

And when the train stopped and my turn came, I had still braids, little braids.

They grabbed me.

I don't have a number, but I had from wires that they threw me on the wires and they threw me in in the train.

- We cannot forget anything.

So when I talk about it, it all comes back.

But there's so many different stages.

First, they took, separated men and women, and of course there were little children.

And the children started crying because their mother was taken away.

We stayed in a barrack.

It was cement, the bottom where we slept on.

And the ovens were right beside us.

Mountains of shoes, mountains, you know.

And we wanted to wear those shoes.

So we could select a pair of shoes earlier, you know.

But my parents, you know, suffered.

And we had to, since he worked in the kitchen, my father, we had some food.

We had potatoes and meat sometimes.

- Mogilev had a river.

It's called Dniester.

Dniester.

You could not go by train.

You could not go with anything, but you needed a ferry.

You need a boat to go through.

The people that they got the numbers to go at night, they stole from the Jewish cemeteries, the gates.

They stole the doors from the homes and they make like a ferry.

I was fortunately, God wanted me to survive.

My number came to go in the morning.

In the morning, they did not open that, that boat, what they made.

And they took me over and it's called Luchinetz.

They pushed us into the Ukraine.

(somber music continues) - My mother would go every morning to the Lithuanian consulate to get papers.

If she hadn't have done that, we would've never gotten out.

And evidently it took a lot of red tape for us to get papers 'cause we had a sponsor in the United States, but we had to get to Lithuania to go from Lithuania to the United States.

It was a train ride from Lithuania to Sweden, and that's where we caught the boat.

It was called the Gripsholm.

And I don't know how long the voyage took, but it took a while, I remember.

I have nobody to ask.

Everybody that knows anything about what happened to us is gone.

My grandfather and grandmother, both of 'em died in a concentration camp, and my mother's three sisters also.

But I do remember it, you know, thinking about it, how lucky we were to get out of there.

- I was in England for about a year and a half, and we could not get a visa.

They vouched for us.

They promised that they wouldn't be at the dole of the government would have it.

But the state department refused to fulfill the quotas for the Jewish refugees at that time.

Finally, after many years of waiting, we got our visas to the United States.

This was 1940, August of 1940.

This was after the war had started, we got our visas.

The war was going on, about a week before the London Blitz.

France had capitulated.

We get on a English boat and we go around Iceland to the north of Iceland and come down the American coast in a convoy where I remember seeing a ship being torpedoed on the left and us standing under the lifeboats.

In Bermuda, we weren't allowed to get off the boat.

And we all went on to Havana after that.

In Havana, there was a guy by the name of Batista who tried to extort some money from us.

And we had no money.

We had barely enough to buy a ticket to New Orleans.

So Batista took us off the boat and put us in a jail-like setting.

And we were in Cuba for about a week under those barracks.

Finally, the banana boat came and picked us up and we came on to the banana boat and the boat was all lit up and there were white napkins on the table and the food was delicious.

And my God, this is heaven.

This is America.

The banana boat had about a hundred passengers, but it hotfooted it to New Orleans.

And we get to New Orleans.

We were reunited with my brothers.

And that was the end of of my saga.

- Luchinetz was my main camp.

I was there for a while.

I was laying one on top of the other.

And I was laying there more dead than alive.

I got malaria.

I got typhus.

I was very sick.

And then one night somebody came by, which I didn't know who he is, if he is German or he is Jewish or he is Russian, and I didn't care.

If he kills me, he killed me.

I'm dead anyway.

He put his hand on my mouth and he said, "You're not crying.

You're not laughing.

You're not doing anything."

He put me on his shoulder 'cause I couldn't walk.

And he carried me.

I didn't know where he's taking me.

It was a carriage full of hay.

It was a little spot.

He pushed me in under that hay and shoved it down.

And he kept on going with the carriage.

So a little lady came and had a white thing on her head.

And me, as a little Jewish girl, never knew about nuns.

And she kept me and started running with me.

And she said, "I will put you in somewhere.

We are not going to come every day to bring you something to nibble or food because they're circling around.

If they're going to find out that we come in there, they're going to see us.

They're going to know that we hiding somebody there."

And I was laying underground by the nuns.

They were my guardian angels.

From 1943 till 1945, I was laying underground.

One day, some other nun, not the same, I don't think it was her, came and ripped off the little door and start pushing me out.

And she said, "You are free."

And I didn't know what free means, but she carried me into her quarters, to the nuns' station.

And she took the uniforms from there and start cleaning me up and wrapped me around, wrapped my feet.

And she said, "Now you're gonna have to go."

So I crawled over to a sidewalk.

Somebody came by, like I said, again, and I opened my eyes very slow and I saw two people and he said to me, "Now we are not going to leave you.

You are gonna have to come with us."

He carried me like a backpack, like your son or daughter would take the backpack going to school.

And we kept on walking to a place called Chernovitz, where the Russian liberated us.

So the Red Cross, they took over.

They worked with the Russian and they said, "Now you have to be with us for a while.

And if anybody survived from your family, they will come through here."

And guess what?

It took a while.

My daddy showed up.

(soft music) - We tried to live as normal as possible together with the family.

Now we were all together in one camp.

Supposedly we were supposed to stay there in Auschwitz and see the war end, and every week transports went to the unknown.

I said my prayer.

I knew it by heart.

When I was in camp, I could not go to sleep without saying my prayer.

To this day, there hasn't been a night that I haven't said it.

And I don't think even if I get bitter or upset, there isn't a night that I could go to sleep without saying my prayer.

(soft music continues) When we had company at home, like people in here in America came to our home, we had dinner together, and I think they were silently sitting there listening to stories.

- Pieces.

Pieces of it.

- Pieces.

- We knew enough.

But the real thing happened was two things.

Once when my cousin Freddie came, who is my father's sister's son, who is 15 years older than I, came, they talked about it and I got a bit of a picture and I was the oldest child.

So you heard the stories from the bits and pieces all your life.

And then you heard it from Mom.

You knew why she had a tattoo.

And but then when you went and saw it in reality, you saw where the ovens were, you saw where the barracks were... I saw the barrack.

I didn't see the barrack 'cause they'd torn it down, but I saw the position of the barrack that Mom was in.

But to tell you the truth, until we went there, it was my imagination.

Then it became very real.

- I think after they talked about their experiences, it actually answered a lot of questions that I would have asked.

You know, I didn't really know what my mom had gone through as far as her survival, her being separated by her parents and then coming together.

So when I listen to people asking her questions, I say to myself, you know, these are questions that I would've wanted to know as well.

There is always one question that I ask, especially, well, both of them, but especially my dad at the time.

And that was, how could you not be bitter?

And my father would say to me, he'd say, "Shuttle, what good would it do me?"

Is what he would say in that voice.

- I think I was actually able to provide insights for him to provide a way to look at his past.

I remember doing a presentation or he was doing the presentation when he first started.

And I said, you know, "Do you realize that everyone who helped your family get out perished?"

And he'd never thought about that, right?

And I said, "You know, that's traumatic."

And he'd never thought about that.

And when he talked about his childhood, and you know, even today he says, "I didn't experience what everyone else experienced."

And he didn't consider himself a Holocaust survivor.

And when I started working with the Center, I said, you know, by definition, because you lived under Nazi rule, you are a survivor.

He says, "But I didn't go to the ghettos or the camps.

I didn't experience the horrors."

And I said, "But you experienced a different kind of a horror."

- My dad's history, I think is a really perfect example of what we used to call the American dream.

His whole life experience could have gone a totally different way.

I mean, think about it.

He was uprooted from his home on no notice.

He had to go across the ocean and come to a place where he didn't speak the language.

My dad does tell the story.

When they first came here, he and his sister Ernie, my Aunt Ernestine, we called her Ernie.

Neither of them spoke English.

My grandmother, of course, spoke English.

But there was, in 1939, there was a fair amount of anti-German sentiment in the US.

It was starting to build.

And so speaking German would not have been received very well.

And so basically, this sounds kind of harsh, but my dad and his sister would not even be served food unless they asked for it in English.

- Whenever we learned an English word, we supposedly forgot the German.

So for a couple of years I didn't even have an accent because when I went to the fourth grade at Dallas Academy, nobody ever made fun of my language or anything.

- So they had to speak in nothing but English, even inside their family home.

And that was because the family felt it was so important that they'd be integrated into the Selma society.

- When she came, Maryville was their first home and they did everything they could to be a part of the community, be a part of the town, be normal Americans.

And they did a great job.

I have to say that we're a little bit too normal sometimes.

But we didn't grow up with this cloud hanging over our head because our parents were immigrants and because they had suffered the way they had.

They didn't talk about it.

They did everything they could to be Americanized and be Americanized, you didn't want to bring this on other people.

You didn't want to have an accent.

You didn't want to not speak English.

They had a square dancing club in the basement of our Maryville, Missouri home.

I'll never forget it.

My sister and I would sit at the top of the steps and saw this stuff going on.

- The reason we came to the United States, like I said, we didn't have nobody.

I didn't have nobody.

So we had to find out that there is family in Charleston, South Carolina.

And it was not even a real uncle, but we called him uncle.

He made our papers to come to the United States.

He wanted to have somebody that survived the Holocaust.

So that's what we hear in that beautiful country.

When we came to United States, I fell to kiss the ground, to bend down and kiss the ground, that I knew I can give my kids the best education and the best that Hitler took away from me in my life.

I'm a greenhorn.

I never had an education.

I used to go around written, and even now, I don't know how to write out of anything.

My kids have to help me.

(soft music) - I came to New Orleans at age 14, in August of 1940.

United States was not at war.

Pearl Harbor had not happened yet.

I go to high school and I remember my mother going with me to high school.

And here's a kid, 14 years old.

And I knew geometry and I knew algebra.

It made me a junior.

So I finished high school at 16.

I went through school and I get to be 18.

And the draft board says, "We give you six months to get into medical school.

If you're not in medical school by September the first, we'll draft you."

LSU let me come in.

I'm in.

I'm not drafted.

Had I been drafted, I would've been in Normandy.

I would've been on the first wave.

So I was lucky.

I come out of medical school and New Orleans is drowned in doctors.

I get a phone call from a guy in Birmingham who was a pediatrician friend of mine.

He says, "There's a guy here who needs help.

He's sick.

He's a OB/GYN and he needs help right away."

And this is how we got here.

I've raised my kids, my grandkids, my great-grandkids.

This is home.

I lived in this house for 53 years.

I have three children that are just extraordinary.

I have eight grandchildren that are just magnificent.

And I have seven great-grandchildren.

I've had a good life.

- And then we came to United States, New York.

I can remember looking up at the buildings and everything.

We didn't stay there but a few days.

When we got to Montgomery, I thought this was our final destination.

And I didn't realize we were going from Montgomery to Selma, Alabama.

That's my home, been my home since 1939.

It's a good place to live, a good place to bring up children.

In fact, my mother got to be secretary of the temple within two years of when we moved here 'cause we had quite a, you know, a big community when I was growing up.

All the stores in town were Jewish.

So we had a good, yeah, it was wonderful.

- He learned English.

He became very social.

My dad had a strong network of friends, classmates.

He was talking about some of 'em today, some of whom he went to Korea with.

I mean it was, you know, he embodies what used to be small town America.

- I went to the University of Alabama for two years and I was in the National Guard.

We were called up in for the Korean War.

We went to Fort Jackson and basic training.

They needed so many tank commanders.

So they got 'em from the different units at Fort Jackson and there were three of us were eligible.

And so they gave us each a straw and the one that drew the short straw got to go to Korea and I drew it.

So I was a tank commander.

I was promoted to a master sergeant when I was 21 years old.

So I was the youngest one in my platoon.

And I was platoon sergeant.

- I think, you know, he's going on to serve in the military.

He came back and got in the National Guard and served longer.

He raised me.

I'm an only child, but then he remarried when I was in college and really raised three more kids, my step-siblings, as a great and caring example, a generous father.

Now he's a very involved and generous grandfather.

I think if you wanted a post-Norman Rockwell, pre-Nixon, trying to get on the right frame there, portrait of what the classic American striver, patriot, family man looked like, it would be my dad.

- [Ruth] My home is Alabama.

- Yeah, I mean honestly, that's the truth of the matter.

You don't consider anywhere else your home.

- No.

- Birmingham's been a wonderful home.

- Yes.

- Raised our family.

- And I have wonderful friends and I still have good friends, but.

- You lived here since 1960.

Birmingham has been such a wonderful town and home to her, our family as a whole.

I mean, it's been unbelievable.

Unfortunately, our professional careers have taken us elsewhere or wives or whatever else.

- And I'm alone here.

- And that's what happens.

And then all of those wonderful friends that she had, they're not many left.

That makes it hard.

- And the thing is, I never like to ask favors because I'm so darn independent.

- You know, my children are 36, 34, and 26.

So they've grown up with this and they've known Oma all their life, so yeah.

And now their children, you know, I have two grandsons.

- And I think I did my job visiting different schools.

- Organizations.

- Small town.

- And organizations, churches, organizations.

- Yes.

- She did a lot of speaking.

She spoke to the legislature of Alabama on different times.

- You know, my husband is a survivor, too.

And his family got killed in Warsaw ghetto.

So he came in 1962.

My husband looked for a job and I put the kids to register.

Sheryl went to kindergarten.

We lived in Brooklyn in East 93rd Street.

We moved from Brooklyn to New Jersey.

And my husband was a contractor, thank God.

And we start living a little bit.

And so, but my son was finished dental school and when he moved to Birmingham, he said, "Dad, it's enough already with your broken back what you went through with Mama and your life.

I would love you to move to Birmingham.

It's nice and clean and warm."

And we moved here and then my daughter and son and the kids moved out to us here too.

And we love it.

Not it says Birmingham the beautiful.

It is beautiful.

- I don't know if there was opportunity back in New Jersey when we lived.

I don't know if they just didn't want to talk about it.

But coming here and listening to them and then seeing the responses that they were getting from the people that they were speaking to was, and I can't even explain the feeling that I had.

I mean, I've always been proud of my parents, always been proud of my mom.

But that just opened up a whole new world for me and a whole new respect for me.

And I am very grateful that all this time, that they had carried all this inside of them.

And to be able to share that and to educate people is just an amazing feeling, really.

- You know, how many eyewitnesses to history are there?

We all die, you know, generations, it goes away.

And that's something that you have to preserve.

- In many ways, they were put into situations where they realized very quickly that bitterness and despondency was not gonna make things any better.

So they just, particularly as they got away from it, they tried to start fresh and make the most they could out of it.

You know, the more I learned about my dad's experiences, and which are so extraordinary, starting with escaping the Holocaust, with coming to, of all places, Selma, Alabama, and I mean, it's just his life is like a series of extraordinary events.

And I've always been extraordinarily proud of him.

And he's a very modest man and I don't think he really come near to understanding how proud I am and how much of a role model he's been for me and for my boys.

- My mom is an amazing woman.

She is strong, tough.

She is a beauty inside and out.

And for the not having any education, I believe she's one of the smartest women that I know.

You know, it's interesting you call it "The Torch," which to me, when I think of the torch, I think of passing the torch from one person to the next.

And in Hebrew there is l'dor vador, which is when you're passing from one generation to the next generation.

And I just, I hope that she's proud of me and that I should only be half the woman that she has through everything that she's been through.

- He taught me not only how to be a good person, but how to take care of things for myself and how to handle things in daily life, from finances to fixing things to everything.

I mean, it gave me a tremendous background and confidence and you know, I guess a mentor in many ways.

Yeah.

- Thank you.

Thank you for asking that question.

That makes everything worthwhile.

- Oh, there you go.

- I think because what she's been through, she's the ultimate survivor.

She survived Nazi Germany.

She came to this country and survived the adjustment of becoming an American, raising children.

- I worked til I was 82 to take care of you.

- Yeah, she worked.

And my father passed away when he was 46 years old.

She left her with a 16-year-old, a 14-year-old, and an 8-year-old.

And she survived putting us through school, college.

We all have educations.

We're all professionals in our own way, very successful.

So, yeah, she's a survivor to the maximum definition of the word.

- They have shared their history and their emotions and they are doing this for the future to learn from their stories.

And when they are no longer here, who is they're going to be to tell their stories.

And I take that very much to heart.

- I really feel if I didn't talk and propagate my knowledge, I would do humanity injustice.

I'm doing this so that it doesn't happen again.

- In the times that we live in, the truth is not always the truth.

- That's it.

- It's a time when people still don't believe that the Holocaust existed.

And to think of that being this day and time a reality is frightening.

And that's why the stories have to be told.

That's why the pictures have to be shown.

That's why the witnesses have to say, this is real.

- We should never forget.

It can happen again.

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