After being moved to the town’s ghetto in 1940, Aud’s father and older brother, Berl, were taken away. To talk is to live it.”Īud was born in 1928 in Zduńska Wola, Poland, near Lodz, as Anshel Sieradzki, the middle son of a tailor, Shmuel Hirsh Sieradzki, and his wife, Jocheved. If we wanted to live, we couldn’t talk about it.
#Rapt audience how to#
“It wasn’t that I wanted to forget, but there were no social workers or psychologists to tell us how to act after this. “I never told my kids,” said Aud during a pre-Holocaust Day talk at a local synagogue. But the desire to share his history came years after he had immigrated to Israel, married and had a family of his own. (photo credit: Courtesy Yad Vashem)Īsher Aud, another one of this year’s torch lighters at Yad Vashem, only recently discovered a similar need to tell his story.
A year later, they were shunted to Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated within weeks by the British Army.Īsher Aud, now 84, said he looked like a ‘sheygetz,’ a non-Jewish boy, with his blond hair and blue eyes, factors that probably helped him survive the Holocaust. “There were friends and friendships and we supported each other.”īy March 1944, half of the children in the children’s block were murdered and in May, Kraus and her mother were sent to labor camps in Germany. “There were moments during the camps when I thought it’s not worth suffering anymore, but one did nothing about it, it passed,” she said. After being sent to Birkenau with her mother, she served as the librarian in the children’s block, helping run activities for the youngest camp inmates, which is where she met her future husband, Otto Kraus. They are less vulnerable because things are as they are, and accepted as they are, and one adapts.” “It grows on you slowly, it’s imperceptible,” she said. Kraus credits her survival to the emotional shield she developed in order to withstand the horrors they experienced. We always thought this is the last thing, there won’t be anymore.” “It became worse and worse and worse and it was all that I knew. “We were harassed and shunted from place to place,” she said, speaking in English. Dita Kraus, now 83, spends much of her time telling her story to young Israelis, relating her years of hardship and pain in labor camps and concentration camps (photo credit: Courtesy Yad Vashem)