My second “set” of parents as I was growing up had survived their years in concentration camp to come to live in America. My second “mom’s” story was told to me only a couple of years ago by her daughter. The story helped me better understand how the horrible legacy of the Holocost followed her the rest of her life.

She had come from a wealthy family in Poland and lived a comfortable, affluent style of life; that all turned around one afternoon as she was walking home from school. Her housekeeper stopped her on the street and said, “You can’t go home, your parents have been arrested and they will arrest you too!” Imagine being 14 years old and finding out your whole world has changed in an instant, in a devastating way. She too was sent to a concentration camp, enduring the misery and hardships of that terrible experience.

Near the end of the war, as the Russians were closing in on the concentration camp, the Germans gathered up the women and threw them into a deep pit in the ground, and she was one of the first to be put into the pit, and covered by the bodies of those who were forced into the pit after her. The Germans then attempted to gas them as they lay helpless in the pit. But before the Germans "finish" the murder of the women, the Russians arrived. They began to remove bodies, most of whom had died. They found my “mom” alive, she was ‘protected” by the pile of bodies on top of her - the fumes had not reached the bottom of the pile where she was located.

The rest of her life, she suffered from illness after illness (some real, some maybe not so physically real), and she seemed to constantly live in fear of bad news reaching her. Her son mentioned that often when the phone rang unexpectedly in her home, she ‘knew’ it must be bad news of some sort.

There is no doubt of the legacy of the Holocost, and it is a legacy we must never forget, to help ensure it must NEVER happen again - to anyone!

Bernard Percy
Producer/Educator
323-461-1052
www.bernardpercy.com