My Mother Worked Miracles During The Holocaust

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we returned to our American stories on February fifth, nineteen thirty eight. Judas Senate was born in Hungary to a family of entrepreneurs. In March of nineteen forty four, the Nazis entered his family’s town and forced them onto trains bound for Auschwitz. They wouldn’t make it there. Let’s get into the story. Here is the late Judas Senate with his story of survival.

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Speaker 2: In my train, there was this guy. I thought it was an old men.

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Speaker 3: He had a stubble, and I remember the sweater was gray, and they led jacket on. He was dead ordered a few days. The train would stop every two three days to take the dead and bury him or burn them.

00:01:00
Speaker 2: And they took him too.

00:01:02
Speaker 3: And I was very angry cause I lost my pillow and I lost my windbreaker. You know, you know that didn’t mean anything. By then, modesty was gone, desire was gone, We lost sense of smell. The whole train became like a big toilet. One bucket was two three gallons of water, and the other bucket was for toilet purposes. Nobody could get to it anyhow, And also you know that bucket was for a man and woman.

00:01:38
Speaker 2: We didn’t have men and woman separate, so we but they.

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Speaker 3: Had a bucket with the water, two three gallons and they put maybe eighty ninety people in each.

00:01:49
Speaker 2: There was only standing room.

00:01:52
Speaker 3: So my mother talked to the commandant, which she was not supposed to do, and she said, look, we know very we are going, but surely you don’t want us to die on the way there. What would the people in Czechoslovakia that we were true? What wouldn’t they say about the Germans? They were the flower of the Western world nineteen thirty three they we won half of the Nobel prizes thirty seven and a half percent of that was won by Jews. What would these people say? What hand to the Germans? So the sergeant to cut his pistol and put it to my mother’s head. They had a very specific order by Hitler. If a Jew opens is not you shoot him on the spot. The only way you can talk is if you ask me a question, he may answer. So he was gonna do his duty. So the commandant, with not even turning around, called him, you dunk affew idiot.

00:02:53
Speaker 2: Can’t you see you killer? We have nobody to talk to. Now.

00:02:56
Speaker 3: My mother knew the rules, but She figured that if you make it to Auschwitz, we’ll be dead, you know, in fifteen minutes coming out of the smokestacks.

00:03:07
Speaker 2: She was very courageous.

00:03:10
Speaker 3: She got lucky, you know, that he placed the bucket with an oil drownd filled with water. There were many, maybe hundreds already were sick, would have died without water. So she really saved a lot of people on the train. So there was actually the first miracle, you know, because this happened with her, not once, several times. We ended up in a lumber yard and the owner was an aster in major Nazi. He helped his shirt taunting us, which a big sweater tooth on his chest. He also had French prisoners of war. They were abiding by the Geneva Code and they were fed well, but we were fed starvation. We had starvation diet. My mother would go out at night after working twelve hours and she would go to the village and she would barter with the wife’s there get babies. She said, get yarn and get a needle, and I’ll make clothes for your children. My mother could do anything with her hands. She’s the one who put the factory together. She’s the one who talked to my father, who was a scholar, was an intellectual, how to work the machines and everything else. So she was making him clothes for their babies. For that she would get a little cheese cup legs, some bread, not too much because they were not supposed to deal with you’ll see that. So they had to be very careful and they she would come probably and maybe one o’clock in the morning. She would come back, getting up five o’clock in morning to go to work again. One night she didn’t come home, so we didn’t know what happened. By next day she didn’t come. Panic started to take over it because we thought my mother, we couldn’t survive.

00:05:13
Speaker 2: There’s no way.

00:05:15
Speaker 3: She was like an eagle, spreading her wings and covering us. See, my mother had three qualities. First, she was a beautiful woman. She was short four ten, but she was built, you know. Secondly, she wasn’t just smarter out of the buck, she was brilliant. And thirdly she had guts. And she was a teenager and her father was entrepreneur. He was in the holes of grocery store. He used to go to the grocery store to collect but that Hungarian was so into Semitic. You know, if we don’t have enough curses in this country, go to hungry. So he was afraid to go to the store. So he said, my mother, she’s fifteen, sixteen years old. She walks into the store. She puts her hands behind her back, starts walking. The guy knew who she was, so open the mat. But my money didn’t pay attention. She always thought us, don’t listen to what they have to say. Let it fly over your shoulder. Watch their hands, cause words cannot kill you, but their hands can kill you. Didn’t pay any attention than a very little, low voice. She says, well, your shell seem to be.

00:06:33
Speaker 2: Stacked pretty well.

00:06:35
Speaker 3: You don’t really need anything today, but you know people are gonna come today, later on, that come tomorrow, that’ll come the day after. In a few days, you’re not gonna have anything to sell. You think my father’s gonna give you another nickel sword. She came home with the money, but she did that kind of stuff for him many times. She was fearless. It’s good and it’s bad. It’s one of the things that I inherited from her. So anyhow, without her, there’s no way we could make it a few weeks later, now, a few days later, I think, all of a sudden she showed up. We didn’t not, I mean, why didn’t they kill her?

00:07:18
Speaker 2: What happened?

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Speaker 3: Somebody in the village squiled, so she was arrested put in jail. In jail, she shared the only did the Austrian beauty twenty years old maybe, and.

00:07:32
Speaker 2: They kept him.

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Speaker 3: She said, he was as handsome as Hollywood was so handsome. And my mother would do anything to save us, whatever it took to save us.

00:07:45
Speaker 2: She never told us why and how. But anyhow I.

00:07:49
Speaker 3: Used to be I used to squeeze her, you know, I said, what happened in that the uh prison? And she said, well, the girl, the Austrian girl, was a beautiful girl. And I said, what was her crime? And she said, because Hitler gave a direct order to all the beauties between eighteen and twenty five to entertain soldiers coming home on furlough. And she, you know, asked her as a Catholic country, and she came from a very good family.

00:08:20
Speaker 2: And they hung her.

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Speaker 3: But my mother she convinced the guy that her four kids and you know, her husband sickly won’t make it with that hair. She had a way of talking to people. She never ever raised their voice, not even on us. Our biggest fear regarding my mother was disappointing her. We knew that she loved us so much. First of all, she would do everything, which she did okay, but it wasn’t just a mild lot, it was the whole body and could tell you know.

00:08:59
Speaker 2: So he disappointed. The disappointed here was terrible.

00:09:04
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to the late Judas Semate, who is a survivor of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting and who died in September of twenty twenty two at the age of eighty four, sharing the story of how his mom saved him and the family. He described his mother as having three qualities. She was beautiful, She wasn’t just smart, she was brilliant, and she had guts, and he shared some of the stories of her courage. My biggest fear I had was disappointing my mother. To disappoint her was terrible. When we come back more of this story from the late Judas senate here on our American stories, and we returned to our American stories and with Holocaust survivor Judah Samt when we last left off Judah was telling us about his gutsy mom who would do anything to ensure the survival of her family in the harshest of conditions. Let’s return to the story. Here again is Judah.

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Speaker 3: A few weeks later, the trains arrived. Finally they loaded us up on the train and we arrived in bergen Belsen. The method there unlike Aushwitz where they killed you right away. The method there was starving you to death. And what happens when you are starved, It kills your immunity system. And the worst thing in the camps was typhoid. Typhoid killed more people than anything else, and also dysentery. Now dysentery was because if you don’t need, your stomach starts to shing shring to the point where you don’t have a stomach, so you put it in and it goes straight out. The whole camp was like a toilet. But the Germans appointed what they called the juden Rat, which was the Jewish committee. Their job was to keep the camp clean. They picked them up for brutality, and they had to be brutal because they the Nazis watched them and they were not brutally enough.

00:11:38
Speaker 2: They were shouldn’t.

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Speaker 3: They never had any problem replacing anybody. So in bergen Belsen, when we arrived there, we already saw at the gate they were about two stories of corpses. They kept dying all day. Many of them just gave up, right.

00:11:58
Speaker 2: Down and die.

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Speaker 3: I mean, if you don’t have hope, you know, you’ve been there two three months the same you get.

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Speaker 2: Weaker and weaker and weaker. So is self. You laid down and you do it, or what you do? You jump on the fence and you died that way, so way.

00:12:21
Speaker 3: At that point that didn’t mean anything to me anymore, you know, because that’s all you saw all the time. That and they, uh, the starvation continued. That three men’s horns. One for the officers, for like a five star restaurant, the best of everything.

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Speaker 2: Second one was for the guards.

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Speaker 3: And the guards usually there were some Nazi, some Germans, but mostly the local Hungarians. Y you had Ukrainians, the Lithuanians. They were the worst of the worst, and they were watching you.

00:12:59
Speaker 2: No.

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Speaker 3: Eventually I made a friend that was about the same sizes myself, the same age. By then I was seven years older. They believe me. By then, you were a man and this friend of mine. We always followed them, the officers coming out of their mentiles. They were always having a wing or they had, say, some other kind of meat, and they were chewing on. And then when they finished their throat on the ground and we drew ourselves on that and grabbed it. There was nothing to eat, maybe, but the taste was still there and that kind of filled us up. Now, in the meantime, the camp was inundated with lice. I mean, the lice was unbelievable. So my mother convinced us to eat the lice. She said, the lice are blood suckers, and blood is protein, and you eat that. So between dead and that, they and what they gave us to eat, which was a h a small hard drug black bread for the six of us, and some colored water that was supposed to be soup.

00:14:17
Speaker 2: That was our meal for the day.

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Speaker 3: But my mother did she broke the bread into olive size and she shared us five six times a day with the tea spoon of that water. So she was the hero in her story, my mother. So anyhow, we were there for ten months, maybe ten and a half months, and then a turd train came and they asked four volunteers to get on the train twenty five hundred, and my mother took us and put us on the train, and that that’s another thing.

00:14:57
Speaker 2: That’s another thing that I discussed with her year’s life. We knew it’s a dead terrain because they were all dead trains.

00:15:05
Speaker 3: We were supposed to die, and they that tra The train was going narn around and around. They were looking for a place where they could finish ourself, but they uh somehow we survived, and eventually after a few weeks we stopped in the forest near Farres Laban and we thought, well, maybe this is where.

00:15:30
Speaker 2: They’re gonna finish us. And sure enough we heard a big grumble. It’s a tank.

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Speaker 3: We noticed this right away, that the tart was not aimed at the train. And then the tart opened and the soldier popped up, and he didn’t have a German uniform. So my father was studying English order it was a scarlet, so he picked it up English.

00:15:57
Speaker 2: Very first he yelled Americans.

00:15:59
Speaker 3: The Americans, Americans, and we were saved by the Americans. From there they took us to Hilar Slaven. Hiller Slaven was a mid sized don over the Rhine where the Rhine was very broad and very deep, and there was a big breach, but the breach was bummed out, so we figured.

00:16:22
Speaker 2: That’s for David.

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Speaker 3: They were going to close the doors and push the train down and just kill twenty whatever twenty two. I don’t know how many were aye a how many were still alive, the chances that she took s I remember, I asked her, you put us on the tr train, you know it was the death train. How did you make the decision? She says, I had the choice to between the the maybe and the short thing. The short thing was if we stayed in Bergan, was now that two days we would feel dead because they’ve stopped feeding or even water. Look, a healthy man can live without water two three days, but a sick person we were already sick.

00:17:14
Speaker 2: There.

00:17:14
Speaker 3: Maybe was if I put you understand, maybe another miracle is going to happen like the first one.

00:17:21
Speaker 2: And she was right.

00:17:22
Speaker 3: She had the right instinct and we survived. And I spoke to my brother about it. You know, it was in Israel, and they always said somebody should make a movie about this woman.

00:17:36
Speaker 2: I don’t know who can play her.

00:17:38
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery, and this interview was conducted before Judah died. He’s also a survivor of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, anti Semitism rearing its head again in his lifetime and so close to home. And by the way, we tell these stories for a reason. There were a few survivors left from the Holocaust, and it was the Americans in large measure in the Allied troops that liberated these camps, as they showed so vividly in Bandit Brothers. All of the Allied troops figured out why we were fighting when they stumbled on these death camps. That a country like Germany, a beautiful country like Germany, could sink to those depths of depravity. What a sad tale, and what a story of his mother’s courage and her intuition. The chances you took. Why did you put us on that third train? He asked his mom. The sure thing or the maybe were the two things she described staying in that camp. It was certain death, the maybe getting on that train and hoping another miracle would happen, which it did. Judas Sammet’s story, the story of the Holocaust, one story at a time, which we do here on our American stories