Before they were all sent to Auschwitz, he hid it in a small box behind a wall in their house. Their parents and five siblings did not, all killed.Īlmost every day, Rose wears around her neck a pocket-watch chain that belonged to her father. The three girls made their way back home. That’s where they were when the war ended a few months later. While her sisters went through the inspection, Rose sneaked out a back door and then joined them out front, where they waited for transportation to a factory. Every morning, some 200 women would be sent to work and live in a factory somewhere.īut getting selected meant taking off your clothes for inspection in the barracks, and how was skinny 14-year-old Rose going to pass? She and two sisters decided their best hope of survival was to get assigned to a work crew. Rose remembers the daily smell of bodies burning in the crematorium. One day early on at the camp, her father told her, “Whatever you do, make sure you stay alive to tell the world what they did to us.” She never saw him again. She got a tattoo on her left forearm: A-25893.
“How old are you?” one of them asked Rose.Īt 14, she might be deemed too young and weak to work, and instead put to death. Inmates at the camp boarded the train to help the newcomers with their belongings. Rose was 14 when her family was sent from Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz in 1944. Ask her the single most persistent memory she has of the place, and she can’t answer.
Rose Schindler, who spent several months at Auschwitz, expects the event to be hard on her emotionally. “From this historic event, their voices will echo across the generations.” “This may be the last major anniversary we will be able to remember with those who experienced the Holocaust firsthand,” said Robert Singer, CEO of the World Jewish Congress, which sponsored the trips to Poland for about 100 survivors, including the Schindlers. There will be speeches Tuesday, along with appearances by top government officials from Poland, Germany, France, Belgium, the United States, and other countries. From 1940 to 1945, an estimated 1.1 million people perished at Auschwitz. The ceremony will be held in a tent outside an eerie, now iconic brick building known as the “Gate of Death,” where railroad cattle cars rolled in and unloaded prisoners.
View the photo gallery: 70th anniversary of liberation of Auschwitz On Auschwitz anniversary, leader warns Jews again targets On Tuesday, they’ll be among an estimated 300 Holocaust survivors from around the world at a ceremony marking the day 70 years ago that the Soviet Red Army liberated the most notorious of the German death camps, Auschwitz. View the Video SD couple takes historic trip Now, at age 85, they are going back to Poland, back to the nightmare. Then all of a sudden they were free, orphans set adrift to find each other at a refugee hostel in England, where they started a life together that brought marriage, a home in San Diego, four children, nine grandchildren, blessings beyond counting. Both lost parents and siblings to that particular madness. Seventy years ago, they were teenage prisoners of the Third Reich, guilty only of being Jewish, caught up in the horror the world would come to know as the Holocaust. It wasn’t their choice 70 years ago, either. But the choice belongs to history, not them. Truth be told, a weekend in late January is not when Rose and Max Schindler would prefer to leave their home in sunny Del Cerro and travel to Krakow, Poland, where snow is expected.
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