A Pair of Survivors

When L was young, he went to preschool. His teachers were a mother/daughter team. Both women had an accent that marked them as immigrants. They tended to wear long sleeved shirts, even in warm weather. It was no secret that they were survivors of the Holocaust, who later converted to Catholicism. Both women radiated an indescribable peace. They were (and I assume still are) awesome women who genuinely cared for their students. I didn't expend much thought on their past. All that mattered to me was that they were here, now, teaching my son.

My mom recently ran into them at a grocery store, and they got to talking. Somehow or another, talk turned to their being Holocaust survivors. I think it had something to do with the difficulties of immigrating to the US. Anyway, they showed mom their tattoos.

When mom told me about it, I was astounded. Because only one concentration camp bothered to tattoo numbers on their victims. And even then, only those deemed fit for the "work camp" received tattoos. The full impact of what they've survived didn't hit me until today, when I stumbled across this page while looking for geology maps. The death march was little more than a tiny notation in my 7th grade history book, so I looked around the site to learn more.

Those two women, who quietly taught my son, survived more than just Auschwitz.
First, they survived a campaign of fear and hatred. Next they were moved to a ghetto in another country, where they survived overcrowding, disease, and mobile killing squads. They survived being moved yet again, this time to Auschwitz. Once there, they both made it into the work camp. A rare thing.
They might have been two of those left behind when the death march began. If not, they were forced to march 35 miles to Wodzislaw, where they were stuffed into freight cars and moved to another camp. It was called a "death march" because only one out of four survived.

All of the above is history. You can follow my links,or do your own research if you'd like to know more. But there's more to the story. The survivors of the concentration camps couldn't go home. Their property had been given away, and the new owners were willing to fight for it. There was a lot of hate, and a lot of fear. The survivors had nowhere to go.

I once asked L's teachers why they chose to move to America. This is what they told me:
After the war, they were in hiding (somewhere), when an Argentinean Jewish group paid for their entry into Argentina. From there, they waited 6 years for paperwork to go through for immigration to America. They chose America because that's where the group suggested they go. They built a life here, and chose a career in pre-school because "Little children are wonderful."