Irene Safran

Survivor

 

Hello, my name is Kara Sachtleben, and I presented the story of Irene Safran to my grandparents.  I wanted to pass on the story of this great woman and hopefully others can share it too.  Here is a part of her story.

 

 

She is a Holocaust survivor who was in the concentration camp-Auschwitz.  She lived in Czechoslovakia, and when she was 21, she went to the camp.  She remembers telling her mother and sister to go with the older people not knowing they would be sent to the gas chambers.  She remembers being so hungry with only eating a tiny bowl of soup and a piece of bread every day: "When a group went to the gas chamber, there were, occasionally, extra rations of food left over. I actually looked forward to this. Can you imagine waiting for people to die, so that you can get an extra piece of rotten potato one inch in diameter that was better fit for pigs than humans? I was terribly ashamed of that, and I still am. You really became an animal there. Every day was like a hundred years.”  She was eventually sent to work in Germany where she and her sister were liberated.  They then traveled around Europe to search for family.  She and her sister found her brother, and they all went to the United States.  Since then, she has not stepped foot in Germany, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary.