Holocaust survivor demands that people remember
By Heather Milo
Acorn Staff Writer

NO WORDS CAN DESCRIBE THE HORROR-Temple Adat Elohim guest speaker Ebi Gabor shares her experience as a survivor of Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust.

A Nazi prisoner at the tender age of 16, a Holocaust survivor of four separate World War II prison camps, 75-year-old Ebi Gabor told her audience at Temple Adat Elohim last week that, "We have to keep the memory. It is our duty to the future, for us, the children—your children. I am a Holocaust survivor, but I am also a witness to one of the darkest chapters of history."

Rabbi Alan Greenbaum, as he introduced Gabor, said, "You have a sense of the importance of tonight. This is not a pleasant topic. Believe it or not, there are more and more people denying the Holocaust. The role you play as the years go on is going to be more and more important." Quoting Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel, Greenbaum said, "The most important thing we can do is to tell the story."

Originally from Hungary and now a mother of two and a grandmother, Gabor said she grew up in a close-knit family with three brothers and loving parents. Life was not that different for them than it was for young people in America, she said. They had movies, friends, and enjoyed getting together for social occasions.

The only thing different, she said, was that all the mothers stayed home to raise their children. A mix of Catholics, Protestants and Jews made up her neighborhood. The difference amongst them was a subject never discussed, even when it became deathly important.

March 19, 1944, the Germans invaded Hungary. Two days later, they enforced a new law that decreed Jews wear a yellow Star of David prominently displayed on their clothing.

She said that men with armbands stormed the city, beat up the Jewish boys and broke temple windows. There was no recourse, she said, the police were already operating under Nazi control.

"We didn’t go to school. We were afraid to leave the house," Gabor said.

It was 2 a.m., only 30 days later, she said, that a hard rap at the widow foreshadowed their future as the family was awakened and arrested. Soldiers stormed into the home and claimed cherished possessions. Gabor said that to this day she is tormented by the memory of watching her father cry for the first time in her young life.

The family had only 10 minutes to pack clothes and three day’s worth of food. They were herded like animals past their own neighbors, she said, people who stood "with vacant eyes, and without a word of comfort." The arrested Jews were relocated to ghettos outside the city.

From there, people were herded into boxcars 20 at a time with no regard to who traveled together, she said. Family members were split, never to see each other again. Bloody fights and shrieks were heard as children were taken from their parents.

For three days and three nights, the Jews remained—crammed in like sardines—locked in the boxcars. A single bucket was tossed into each car and the occupants were told that was their toilet. Gabor said people drank their own urine. Young children screamed that they wanted to go home.

At the camps, the women were separated from the men. They were marched into lice-ridden barracks with bunk beds three stories high. Six women were assigned to each bunk.

Breakfast was coffee, which the prisoners later discovered was laced with medicine to make the women stop menstruating. Lunch was a bowl of soup: one bowl to every five people. Dinner was a piece of bread, and Gabor said that it was only natural that the prisoners over food.

No one was allowed to talk outside the barracks. Gabor lost much of her family to the gas chambers, including aunts, cousins and her father. "This is like a shadow. It follows me. Try as I may, I cannot get rid of it." People were not only gassed to death or tortured to death, but also killed by dogs or allowed to starve.

One young boy from the audience asked if Gabor still had her identification number tattooed on her arm, and asked if he could see it. "Yes, of course you may," she replied, and rolled up her sleeve. Waves of children stood up and leaned in, as if pulled by a magnet. "Can we see, too?" asked a young girl. At the beginning of Gabor’s number is a letter A—A for Auschwitz.

Her story does have some silver in all that dark gray storm. Gabor met her first husband in a concentration camp—he used to throw her cheese and sausage, wrapped in cloth, over the fence that divided the men’s camp from the women’s.

Gabor said that during her time in the camps that she both lost and regained her faith in God. "God gave me a reward. He kept me. And He’s still keeping me," she said with a smile. "He is with me all the time. And we are the best of friends."

There are, however, no words to describe the hell that it was, she said. She managed, by way of much secrecy, to remain with her mother throughout her imprisonment. "They could not take away our heart, our minds, our brains, our talent." Educated Jews were fed more, she said, especially the ones with talents or who played musical instruments. "Education is the most important thing in life."