Remembering the Holocaust
Survivor warns of totalitarianism

By RAY WYCHE

Gizella Abramson has a knack for remembering times and dates of her past, and many of her recollections are shocking.

Abramson, who emigrated to the United States in 1946 and later graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, recently spoke to a group of teachers at Vineland Station under the sponsorship of the N.C. Department of Public Instruction. Her lectures deal with the dangers of totalitarian governments. She knows firsthand how life can be under a dictatorship, and she vividly recalls the horrible events in her earlier life as a prisoner-laborer of the Nazis in World War II.

“On the first day they (the Nazis) got in town at 6 a.m. and at 3:30 they banged on our door. It was an SS officer with the police behind him. They already knew where every Jew lived. Everything of value was taken away. The majority of the Jews were not well off and they threw their things away.”

Even before the Nazis arrived and she became a forced laborer, Abramson recalls the harsh life of a young girl living under the domination of the Soviet Union. The infamous “non-aggression” pact between Germany and the USSR divided Poland between the two conquerors, with Abramson’s town becoming part of the Soviet Union.

“They (the Soviets) told us how wonderful collective farms were. (Her father owned his own farm, which was confiscated). Nothing belongs to you; everything belongs to everybody,” she recalls the Soviets saying.
She, her parents and her one brother lived in an apartment with four rooms, plus kitchen and bathroom.

“They told us it was bourgeoise to have that much room. They moved a family into each of the four rooms.”

Life had become hard for the Abramson family but undreamed-of cruelty awaited them.

On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler set off World War II when Nazi troops marched into the divided Poland. All Jews were sent away; the young, healthy ones such as Abramson were forced to work as slave laborers in German munitions factories.

“They needed people to work,” she says
Others of the Jewish faith—mothers with babies, the ill, the old—went to death camps.

Before her deportment, Abramson and others of her race were subjected to continual cruelty, sometimes subtle but more often bloody. Jews had to wear armbands with a blue Star of David on it to mark them as Jews. There were other indignities as Hitler and his henchmen worked toward a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.”

“We were not permitted to shop until 5 p. m. Curfew for Jews was at 5:30. And there was nothing left in the stores. All Polish food was going to Germany.”

She remembers some of the shocking scenes she witnessed as a young girl, including watching as German soldiers snatched babies from their mothers’ arms and pushed them into trucks. The mothers were then forced into the vehicles.

“The mothers were screaming. It was pure bedlam. We never saw them again. They were all killed outside of town.”

Once the Nazis took over her area, Abramson’s life took on an unbelievable course. She was moved to a ghetto and crowded into a small room with five other people and no furniture.

“We had no running water and it was very cold.”

From the crowded existence in the ghetto, she and others were moved to the munitions factory somewhere in eastern Germany. They were not told where they were, but were told only they were to work. It was here that she endured her harshest treatment.

“We were each given a number. You were no more a human being, you were a number. You had to remember your number. If you forgot it, you died. They wanted to kill all the Jews. You worked 16 hours a day on 650 calories. A teenager today eats that much for breakfast. We ate only cabbage and potato peels.

“The well for the camp was open only two hours a day and when you got water, the police would try to knock it out of your hands.”

The cruelty continued, even after the Germans realized the war was lost. From the east, the Russians were rapidly advancing toward the weakening Nazi forces.

“The whole earth was shaking from artillery explosions,” Abramson says, and the Germans quickly moved their munitions factory and some of their slave laborers toward the west to escape capture by the Russians, who were noted for harsh treatment of prisoners of war.

The shooting finally ending, Abramson remained in captivity until liberated by the American Army on May 9, 1945. Her body was weakened from the years of mistreatment and malnutrition, and she was hospitalized until August. It was a long, slow recovery.

“I had to learn to walk again. I had to order my body to move. I looked like death warmed over,” she says. “American nurses gave me some clothes and I put paper inside my shoes.”

After years of suffering, she was free and within a few months she made her way to the United States. But her parents and her brother all died in Nazi death camps, she says.