It's a Sin to Waste - a True Holocaust Survivor Story

For some survivors, the war was never over.

My mother had many peculiar habits.

Whenever we would go out to eat at a restaurant, at the end of the meal she would make a little assembly of the leftover rolls, meat and vegetables, wrap them up in a napkin or a handkerchief and put them in her purse. I was very young then, 11 or 12, and didn't understand this odd behavior. When I would ask her why, she would respond, "It's a sin to waste."

My mother didn't talk much about the Holocaust when we were young, probably because she knew we wouldn't understand, and to protect our tender emotions. When I was in my mid teens, things changed, and she began to tell us what had happened to her as a child.

She was 11 when the Germans came. She was in school when she heard shelling and explosions. A shell hit the school house, setting it aflame. A teacher was dropping her and the other children from the second floor to the ground below, when she fell on a flaming ember that burned her knee badly. It would take months to heal. I recall the scar on her right knee even when she passed away in 1997. It was very pronounced, very large.

The Germans came and took the children away. My mother was one of five children, and was entrusted with the care of her younger brother Eli, who was in the same school house as she that day. A young German soldier was screaming "Mach Schnell! Mach Schnell!" in order to hasten them out of the bed of the truck. The soldier became so frustrated, he grabbed my mother by the arm and threw her to the ground, causing the arm to break. She was then sent to a temporary interment camp in Germany until the Nazis would decide her fate. Eli quickly became sick with Rheumatic fever, and was sent to the crematoria before her eyes. She would often cry over that. He was her responsibility. She loved Eli dearly, and in some odd way felt it was her fault that he died.