**Editor’s Note: This article contains mentions of graphic violence and genocide**
Ruth Cohen, a Holocaust survivor, told her story and shared her thoughts on Jewish identity at an event held by American University’s Hillel chapter on April 1 in the Butler Boardroom.
The event, moderated by David Marchick, the dean of the Kogod School of Business, was held as a part of Holocaust Remembrance Week to honor and bring awareness to the genocide that killed over 6 million Jewish people, and millions of others including Romani and Polish people. The week includes a 24-hour name reading of Holocaust victims and a tabling event by AU Hillel throughout the week.
Cohen, who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp at 15 years old, shared her story with a group of students and guests at the first event of the week.
“I survived by sheer will, sheer hope, I had no other means to survive,” Cohen said.
Cohen grew up in a traditional Jewish family and community in a small town in then-Mukačevo, Czechoslovakia, which became a part of Hungary during World War Ⅱ and became Soviet Ukraine after the war ended. She remembers her early childhood in the 1930s as peaceful and said, “It all went very well until March 18, 1938.”
In 1938, Nazi forces split up Czechoslovakia, and Mukačevo became a part of Hungary. This divide also imposed strict antisemitic laws upon Cohen’s family and hundreds of other Jewish people. Her father lost his wine and beer manufacturing business, and the co-ed schools children like Cohen attended were immediately separated by gender.
Six years later, the Nazis invaded Hungary and began the deportation of approximately 440,000 Jewish people, most of whom were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
“We woke up in the morning with tanks making these awful noises,” Cohen said of the invasion.
Within a few weeks, Cohen’s family was told to pack a few belongings and go to an informal ghetto just three blocks away from their home, where they stayed until being rounded into freight train cars to Auschwitz. While being forced into the cars, Cohen said she saw her chemistry teacher refuse to step on the platform. Nazi officials shot her teacher within seconds.
While on the train to Auschwitz, they were not given water or food, and Cohen said, “We were told we were going upstate to work in the fields.”
But the freight cars did not arrive upstate. Instead, they arrived at the wrought iron gates of the Auschwitz extermination camp, where 1.1 million people were murdered between 1940 and 1945. Cohen’s mother and brother were immediately separated from the family and sent to the gas chambers, while her father was sent to work as a laborer. Cohen and her sister were able to stay together.
“We were taken to this place to be shaven, showered and dressed in striped clothing,” Cohen said. “I have absolutely no memory of that, which is kind of uncanny, but that’s when we were taken to our barracks.”
In the barracks, a friend of her sister named Miriam Leitner found the sisters and ensured that Cohen received a job as a message courier, carrying messages from Nazi officials to barracks supervisors.
“That job kind of saved my life,” Cohen said.
After being sent to two other concentration camps near the end of the war, Cohen and her sister were liberated by partisans and American soldiers who helped nurse Cohen back to health after she suffered from sickness and malnourishment. However, when Cohen and her sister reunited with their father in Soviet Russia and attempted to return to their childhood home, they ran into yet more strife.
“They didn’t even open the door, my dad knocked on the door and they just ignored it completely,” Cohen said of the residents of her former home.
During the wave of deportations in Hungary from 1944 to 1945, many Hungarians, particularly those who were members of the Nazi party, were encouraged to buy up and occupy homes that belonged to deported Jewish families, like the Cohens.
After living upstairs in her grandparents’ old apartment for a few years after the war, Cohen immigrated to the United States in 1948, where she met her husband and had three children.
But for years, Cohen’s story stayed within the confines of her family, and she only considered sharing her experience when she began volunteering at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as a translator of old Czechoslovakian documents.
“I just thought I wasn’t capable of it,” Cohen said about speaking to the public.
As Cohen told her story she hadn’t shared for 70 years, students’ eyes filled with tears and many spoke about their own relations to the Holocaust as descendants of survivors.
“First, Americans have to know about the Holocaust because so many young and old don’t,” Cohen said.
According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2020, most U.S. adults reported having some knowledge of the events of the Holocaust, but less than half could identify how many Jewish people were killed in the genocide or how Adolf Hitler rose to power.
This lack of knowledge can transform into denial, as a poll from The Economist found that one-fifth of those aged 18-29 in the U.S. today believe that the Holocaust was a myth.
Diane Saltzman, who attended the event as a representative of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, said that one of the best ways to combat misinformation and ignorance surrounding the Holocaust is to encourage people to visit the museum and talk to Holocaust survivors, many of whom share their stories daily on the first floor.
“People need to start to learn the history of how and why it happened and what made it possible in a civilized, educated society that eventually turned against its own citizens and overtook an entire continent, with the intention of murdering every Jew,” Saltzman said.
Cohen said she has seen echoes of such a society in today’s America, as President Donald Trump increases the detainment of college-aged political dissidents and the deportation of immigrants.
“I have been quite terrified since 2015 about what is going to happen,” Cohen said. “I’m in a terrified mental state constantly.”
As Cohen said antisemitism intensifies and the political climate heightens, she hopes that more Jewish people, especially those who are young, will find pride in their identity. She said she has seen some Jews repress their identity recently and hopes that this trend will not continue.
“Many parents ask me ‘What can we do to teach our children to fight back?’ … and it’s just for them to learn as much or more about what happened as possible, so that they can be armed with knowledge,” Cohen said.
This article was edited by Payton Anderson, Tyler Davis and Abigail Turner. Copy editing done by Luna Jinks, Olivia Citarella, Sabine Kanter-Huchting, Ariana Kavoossi, Hannah Langenfeld and Ella Rousseau.
