Eyewitness Testimony
Quotes from No Denying: Delawareans Bear Witness to the Holocaust
Survivors
“We were taken by the Nazis on September 13, 1939...we were awakened about 6:00 in the morning, taken down to the police station and with a lot of other Berlin residents, herded into trucks, stripped, put on trains and taken to Sachsenhausen...I became claustrophobic...to this day, I am afraid to go into elevators or small places...everything has to be open.”
Leo Brenner
“This extermination was done very systematically; they had engineers planning it...each city was made "Judenrein," clean of Jews...they would clean up one city and when they killed them all, they would go to the next city...we hoped the world would not let us down, that somehow the world would hear about it, and we'd be safe...of course, the world didn't.”
Dorothy Finger
Leo Brenner, born December 13, 1921 in Berlin, Germany
Dorothy Finger, born August 8, 1929 in Stanislavov, Poland
Righteous Gentiles
Newlyweds Gerard and Ger Van Raan were asked by a friend, Antje Roos-Geerling, a member of the Dutch Underground, to hide an 8-year-old Jewish boy, Rudolf Klijnkramer. They immediately replied, “Yes.” Two months later, they were asked to hide another Jewish boy, Rudolf Liebknect, only 8 months old, and again they replied, “Yes.” When asked in an interview, “why did you do this?” Mrs. Van Raan said, “You’re asking the wrong people the wrong question. You have to ask, why didn’t more people do anything?”
Halina Wind Preston with David Lee Preston.
Leopold Socha was a petty criminal and a sewer worker in Lvov, Poland, when he discovered a group of Jews hiding in the rat-infested tunnels of the sewer, in the summer of 1943. Among them was Halina Wind (Preston). They had fled there as the Nazis murdered the last Jews of the Lvov ghetto. Socha knew that helping the Jews was punishable by death and that if he betrayed the victims' whereabouts, the Nazis would reward him. The Jews spent 14 months in the sewer, and Socha brought them food every day. Although the Jews did pay him, the amount did not even cover the cost of providing food and clothing. He also brought them a Jewish prayer book and Sabbath candle sticks from the remnants of the destroyed Jewish community of Lvov.
Gerard and Ger Van Raan
Mrs. Van Raan with 8 month old Rudolf Liebknecht.
Liberators
“There was a camp on top of the hill...there were ovens going full blast...the people who survived, and I don't know how they even did...I don't know how they live through their memories...nobody would admit they were Nazis...nobody was a Nazi in Germany when we went there...”
“We approached Dachau and the first thing we hit were box cars with dead bodies...and for a kid who had never seen anything like that before, you couldn't believe that people could be that mean, rotten and hurtful...In Germany we learned how to hate.”
Julius Hendel, born May 20, 1920 in Brooklyn, New York.
Member, U.S. Army,
45th Infantry Division
Member, U.S. Army,
Fighting 59th Division,
461st Anti-Aircraft, Battery C
Vincent Consiglio, born October 21, 1924 in Wilmington, Delaware