In preparation for her February 2022 bat mitzvah, Maxanne Wallace-Segall interviewed Judy Weissenberg Cohen of Toronto, a Holocaust survivor, a member of the Remember the Women Institute Advisory Board, and an advocate for telling women’s stories.
As part of the preparation for her February 2022 bat mitzvah, Maxanne decided her project would be interviewing Holocaust survivors. Remember the Women Institute connected her with Judy Weissenberg Cohen of Toronto, a member of our Advisory Board and a long-time activist to integrate women’s experiences into Holocaust history. She sent Maxanne a letter with her story, and soon after that they met over Zoom. Maxanne posted Judy’s story on her Facebook page, calling it “extremely powerful and moving.” Both Maxanne and Judy are allowing us to share the story here.
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Judy Weissenberg Cohen’s Pre-bat mitzvah letter to Maxanne
My name is Judy Weissenberg Cohen. I was born in Hungary, in the city of Debrecen into an Orthodox Jewish family. I was the youngest of seven siblings to 3 sisters and 3 brothers.
Debrecen is where I was a happy, young child. Here is where we celebrated our many, Jewish Holy Days with prayers and delicious meals. In 1933, I was five years old when Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany but at that tender age I was unaware of its significance. As a five year old, I started to go to school and enjoyed my next five years as a happy child, in the midst of a caring family, not knowing much about world affairs. My parents made sure that their worries about the frightening Nazi deeds and laws, would not affect my innocent, young life.
In 1938, when I was 10 years old, a bit younger than you are Maxanne now, the first, historically significant brutal pogrom (vicious attack against Jews ) took place right through Germany and Austria by the Nazis, “Kristallnacht”, the night of broken glass, burning down hundreds of synagogues and other atrocities. There was enough fear in the air even for us children in Hungary. From this day on in Hungary too discrimination against Jews begins with numerous anti-Jewish laws, edicts and orders.
We didn’t know it then but in hindsight, we can see how the road to the gas chambers started by depriving Jewish people of their basic human and civil rights. There is an important lesson here for all times.
Of the many laws too many to mention, made life for Jews in Hungary increasingly difficult. First, hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced out of their jobs thereby fathers losing their source of income that sustained their families. This law affected my family too. They took away my father’s business license, there was no more income.
The Third anti-Jewish Law, called “Numerus Nullus”, prohibited Jewish students from entering university this meant that my sister Klára and brother Leslie could not continue their education.
When I was in middle school, 12 years old, your age now, all financial state support has been withdrawn from the Jewish parochial schools I attended hat caused hardships for thousands of students like I was. We had to pay high tuition fees in high school and our family had no income.
As you can appreciate, these laws were devastating, stripping the Jewish citizens of Hungary of their economic, human and civil rights. If that wasn’t enough, vicious, anti-Jewish propaganda became the order of the day. Scholars and survivors know today that the Holocaust really started with words. Hateful words. It didn’t start with being pushed into the cattle cars or, with the gas chambers. The demonizing, hurting propaganda started first and foremost by the educated professors and students in universities, then repeated by the politicians, the writers, radio commentators and news editors,(today you would say on social media, FB, twitter etc.) – blaming all problems of Hungary on the Jews alone and the people in our civil society around us started to believe it all and started hating.
This is an important lesson for us regarding hate-speech today, as to how to eliminate them?
With the Nazis invading Poland, World War II started, shocking everyone in Europe.
Hungary’s government joined the Nazis in this war
As a result a new law was established a Jewish slave-labour battalion, created attached to the Hungarian army. In 1941 all Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 50 were conscripted to the army to become cannon fodder in the war.
All the fathers, brothers and sons disappeared from our lives.
From here on, all the worries and holding the rest of family together fell on the women in the community, and in my home, mainly on my mother and my oldest sister Elizabeth who proved to be a pillar of strength and compassion.
The Deportation to a death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau
As I am writing this story for you, Maxanne memories are abound and vivid.
75 years cannot erase them. March 19, 1944, I was 15 ½ years old, was the fateful day when a Nazi Gauleiter, Adolf Eichmann with only 266 of his henchmen entered Budapest, the capital of Hungary, to round up and oversee the deportation of Hungary’s Jews.
Together with the dreaded Hungarian gendarmes (special police force) they liquidated close to half a million Hungarian Jews, including my family. Imagine! It took only 57 days and about 200 thousand cooperating bureaucrats to accomplish this dreadful task.
I still remember vividly the dreaded, daily orders by the Gestapo (German secret service) and my father beaten up by them; the closing of our Jewish schools; to wear the discriminatory yellow star all the time while out in public, to hand in all our valuables; to be driven from our homes into overcrowded designated areas for Jews only called ghettos. Then, finally, our long walk through the city to a brick factory, the last station before deportation. Our sad walk was viewed by most of our old-time and new neighbours, by lining up on the sidewalks. There were a few tears here and there but mainly they were glad we were driven away.
Women in concentration and death camps.
Unforgettable is June 29, 1944, a hot summer day. The cattle car left Debrecen. Bolted tightly, carried all of us to an unknown destination.
It was full to the brim with 78 people – among them, members of my immediate and extended family. Within hours, the voices of prayers, the crying and children’s whining mixed with the unbearable stench emanating from the lone container that served as toilet for 78 people. The desperate mothers were trying to keep the hungry and thirsty children calm. My 18 months old nephew, Peter, was dying of dysentery, while we, the young, single women, stood tightly packed, like herrings in a jar, hardly able to breath and totally stunned.
These are just the bare facts – the underlying feelings of fear and uncertainty are more difficult to convey. The dreadful atmosphere in the cattle car definitely foreshadowed something ominous to come.
The rich family and community life we were forced to leave behind was now a much-treasured memory only. Gone were those happy, carefree school years with my youthful trials and tribulations. Somehow, in the cattle car they seemed utterly trivial.
We arrived four days later, in the hellhole of the world, Auschwitz-Birkenau, is a sordid memory of an unbelievably traumatizing, new experience.
Two male prisoners opened the heavy doors and jumped in. One of the men was immediately yelling “heraus, heraus” (out! out!!) on top his lungs but the other one was whispering to the women, who were holding babies or held little children’s hands, saying in a hushed, urgent tone: “give the children to the grandmothers or to the older women” repeating this many times without any explanation. Few, women heeded his urging. (Only decades later did we learn that those men were members of the secret Canada Commando and were trying to save the lives of the young mothers who were with children.)
After the first selection I never saw my father again. High-ranking SS officers then selected the women. Mothers, with their children, and all the elderly women were sent to the left.
Young women like my three sisters and myself, to the right. Of course, we didn’t know what either direction meant. I saw my mother the last time then, parting without a goodbye or that last hug. I am 92 years old now and I am still missing that last hug. You see, Maxanne, we didn’t know we would not see each other ever again. We didn’t know we should have said goodbye.
We, four sisters: Elizabeth, 27 years old, Klára 22, Eva 19 and I, who were selected to live, at least for a little while, were led to an ugly, gray building called the “sauna”, and here we were ‘processed’: we had to take off our clothes, our hair was cut off and numbers tattooed on the arms of some. Later on we got a dirty old garment to wear.
We were paralyzed with fear not knowing what else to expect. Within a few short hours, we were bald, dressed in rags, and humiliated, we became nameless entities. Eventually, that night, they settled us down in the most primitive, unfinished camp in Birkenau, called by the prisoners,” Mexico”. That night, hundreds of us in a barrack, slept on the bare floors and we cried through the night. That is how our miserable lives started in this death camp.
Weeks later we learned that all the mothers with their babies and children and the older women were murdered the same day of our arrival or overnight in the four gas chambers of Birkenau, the visibly pregnant woman also faced immediate death by gassing. This is how many of my own family members were murdered.
I never forgot this but its wider and deeper significance came into focus only decades later after I became computer and Internet literate. I got angry by the glaring omission of this issue on other Holocaust related web sites, I decided to create my own and called it simply “Women and the Holocaust a Cyberspace of their Own”. http://www.theverylongview.com/WATH/
My personal nightmarish memories are being always very hungry, the starvation kind that never ends. I was terrified of the guards and their brutal beatings; constant fear of the “selections” – that could tear me from my older sisters; or to be sent to be gassed. My stomach was constantly in a knot and the bowels ready to burst. Birkenau, every single day was a physically, emotionally and psychologically terrifying place.
This camp was an industrialized murder factory without equal – the perfect combination of a vicious, racist, sexist ideology and the most modern technology of its time.
But prisoners also had a chance to resist actively.
Women and men who were an integral part of the Jewish resistance, showed some of the greatest courage. Resistance to the Nazis took many forms. Jewish and non-Jewish women were particularly useful as couriers and smugglers of weapons, especially in Poland and Holland. Many women, with so-called “Aryan” non-Jewish looks, could easily pass as non-Jews. Females had one advantage: they did not bear the sign of circumcision, if and when they were stopped for identification.
Other girls and women who resisted differently
Gisi Fleischman was a tireless rescuer of hundreds of children in Czechoslovakia, until she was betrayed, arrested, sent to Auschwitz and murdered there by gas.
Vladka Meed, in Poland, lived as an “Aryan” (non-Jew). She mentions in her book: “We spared neither effort nor expense in trying to persuade Poles to hide Jewish children in their homes.”
Hanna Szenes, a 23-year-old parachutist from British Mandate Palestine, dropped into Hungary by the British to rescue British pilots, but was caught and executed by the Hungarian fascists in October 1944.
The late Fay Schulman, from Poland, who later lived in Toronto, was a gun-fighting warrior or partisan, as they were called then.
Estera Wajcblum, Roza Robota, Regina Safirztajn, and Ala Gertner were four women who were executed in Birkenau in January 1945, for their participation in the only uprising that took place in Birkenau, blowing up one of the gas-chambers.
The page on my website “Women of Valour” by Dr. Yaffa Eliach will give you a lot more additional detailed information. Maxanne, I want you to know that there were Gentile women and men who rescued Jewish children by hiding them in Poland, Hungary, Holland and France. Many of them were nuns in Catholic churches or institutions. They are to be remembered, too, as the best role models to emulate.
After Auschwitz-Birkenau
After Auschwitz-Birkenau I was taken to two more camps, Bergen-Belsen first then to Ashersleben. Here I worked as a slave worker at the age of sixteen, in the Junkers airplane-parts factory, near Leipzig in Germany,12 hours a day along with 8 and 10 year old Russian children. One day one of those children gave me a large hidden piece of hard candy – I was so moved by this gift because that was a rare generosity under those difficult circumstances. This boy had a heart.
In these camps every Jewish life depended on the limitless power of the Nazis, but women, by helping each other, tried to better the odds. Women’s life-stories, allow us to see the strength and courage of Jewish and non-Jewish women who were victims of Nazism but who also were, at the same time, active agents of their own survival.
One of my fondest memories is of my oldest sister Elizabeth. She saved my life twice while we were together. Shortly after our arrival in Birkenau she managed to make four wooden spoons with a borrowed knife in order to be able to force feed us younger sisters with that awful tasting mixture they gave us to eat but we didn’t want to swallow. Elizabeth forced us to eat.
A few weeks later when I got sick she undertook some heavy work for an extra portion of bread. This she brought to me in the so-called hospital every day to “fatten” me up so I won’t get too emaciated looking and would have been sent to die in the gas chamber.
I was simply heartbroken when I learned after the war that this wonderful person starved to death in another terrible camp called Stutthof, along with my other sister Klára, in spite of my surviving sister Eva’s heroic effort and subsequent brutal punishment for trying to save them both.
Finally what I feared most. I was brutally torn in Auschwitz, from my three older sisters and remained alone at the age of sixteen, was also very sick with dysentery and depressed and utterly hopeless. But I was street-smart enough by then to ask two sisters whom I knew from my hometown if I could be their camp-sister since I was left alone. They readily agreed and we became “camp sisters.” I know for sure I wouldn’t have survived without their constant caring during our aimless and long death march of about 100 km without any provisions of food or water to sustain us. It was important for me to know that others cared whether I live or die. I just wanted to belong to someone.
This is the kind of world I faced as a young girl along with all the other young women. Without knowing these all-important details about the women’s special suffering the history of the Holocaust is not complete.
Finally our terrible “marching” (more like dragging ourselves) came to an end. Our group of emaciated, filthy, lice-ridden, hopeless women, were liberated, purely by chance, on the road, by an American military unit on May 5, 1945. It was a beautiful sunny Saturday.
It took us weeks and for some, months to recuperate and become, what I call, born-again, human beings again. I was 16 years old and I desperately wanted to know if I was still somebody’s sister, did I have any family left? I frantically wanted to find my siblings.
I was lucky.
Eventually, I found back in Hungary my youngest of three brothers, Leslie, sick but alive and three older male cousins. Seven months later we found Eva convalescing in the Bergen Belsen DP (displaced person) camp, still recovering from her struggle to survive. Now we were a family again but in reduced number.
We had to accept the tragic fact taht our parents, 2 brothers and two sisters plus our little nephew Peter, my oldest brother’s infant son with his Mother Magda were murdered in the Holocaust. They are part of hat 6 million innocent Jewish victims the world now knows about.
Finally, in 1948, the three of us managed to emigrate to Canada and settled down in Montreal first as contracted garment workers. Canada gave us the best opportunity to rebuild our shattered lives. We found happiness too. I married Sidney Jessel Cohen, and eventually had the courage to have children, Michelle and Jonathan. We raised them successfully and today both of them are professional adults.
However, before I could enjoy my peaceful retirement in 1993, I had a personal confrontation with a group of neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers in downtown Toronto, this made me to become a public speaker on the important subjects, of fighting prejudice, bigotry and hate through telling my story of surviving the ultimate manifestation of hatred, the Nazi Holocaust.
Your generation dear Maxanne must learn from us living witnesses, while we are still around, that this kind of depravity is possible among humans. Sadly, this is still a troubling and troubled world. There is much work to be done to rectify it.
I always hope dear Maxanne that the young and the not so young people for that matter, who listen to a survivor’s story will not cry but rather would start thinking about the issues we are facing today in the light of this dreadful history and will be courageous enough to stand up and be counted should the need arise when facing a hateful challenge.
Would you try to be one of them?
With best wishes and love for a peaceful and successful future,
Judy Cohen