Holocaust: ‘It’s a proper miracle that I am here,’ survivors live to tell the tale

Ella Blumenthal held her niece’s hand tightly and waited to die. They had been herded into a gas chamber at the Madjanek concentration camp in the middle of the night.

There were seconds left in her life.

“We had been chased into a bath house, but it was a gas chamber. I knew poison would come down from the roof,” she told attendees to the annual Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) commemoration yesterday at Johannesburg’s Westpark Cemetery in a pre-recorded video.

“I was holding my niece’s hand tightly. I said ‘don’t be afraid. I don’t think it will hurt.’ I realised it wouldn’t take long. ‘We will soon join our families,’” she told her niece.

‘Miracle’

Just then the heavy doors to the gas chamber burst open and an SS man marched in to tell them they were not going to be gassed.

They thought it was a mistake, but it wasn’t. “It’s a proper miracle that I am here.” The annual day of remembrance was gazetted by the Israeli Knesset in 1951, to be observed on the 27th of the Hebrew month of Nisan, which in 1943 corresponded with 19 April.

Final destruction

This was the day that the Nazis began the final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, which they had established three years before on a 3.4km2 ghetto in the Polish capital.

At its height there were just under 500 000 people packed into the ghetto. The final attempt by the Nazis to deport the remaining Jews in April 1942 would take just under four weeks as the might of its war machine was thwarted by the determination of the Jews that were left not to go willingly to the death camps.

They fought with petrol bombs, bare hands and captured German rifles. By the time the ghetto had been reduced to rubble, 56 065 people had either been killed on the spot or sent to Madjanek and Treblinka camps.

Blumenthal was one of them. She entered the ghetto as a 19 year old in 1940, with her parents and her six siblings. “[The Nazis] set the ghetto on fire, building by building.

We had no option, we had to come out. I can never erase the sight of the burning ghetto and the smell of the burning feathers of the bed ding is forever in my nostrils,” she said.

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23 deceased relatives

When the war ended, she was the only one of her immediate family to survive. Between herself and her niece who had been with her, they had lost 23 relatives.

Blumenthal met and married a South African and moved to Brakpan. Today she lives in Cape Town. She was the subject of an award-winning documentary I Am Here in 2021 and on Monday, her story, I Am Ella. written by Joanne Jowell was published.

She has never stopped believing or appreciating the miracle of her life, so much so that she goes to sleep with her curtains open. “The beauty of the world will stay forever.

“When I wake up, I see the world and I see the sun coming up. I want to wake up to see the dawn coming in. “I never gave up hope, I never lost faith in God.

“We must not forget to thankful and remember tomorrow will be a better day. I always knew that I’ll survive and that I’m going to tell the world what happened.

This must never be forgotten.” Telling her story to the next generation is her mission, to ensure that no-one else ever has to die again because of prejudice and hatred.

Only by talking, by understanding, can the world learn not to hate and not to kill. If they don’t learn to talk, it could happen again.

“Don’t blame each other for the different colour or different religion, we are all one nation, we are all the same, God’s creatures,” she said yesterday.

As Harold Jacobs, the chair of the Gauteng council of the SAJBD, said: “On Yom Hashoah, Jews the world over remember the six million murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, but it’s not only to remember and to mourn, it is to commit anew to fight the evils that made this crime against humanity possible.”

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– news@citizen.co.za