Margit Buchhalter Feldman was fifteen years old when her
family was murdered at Auschwitz. She lied about her age, telling the Nazis she
was eighteen, and was assigned to forced labor rather than being killed in the
gas chambers.
She was born in Budapest on June 12, 1929, the same birth date as Anne Frank. She and her two parents were imprisoned in 1944 before they were taken to Auschwitz. She said in a 2016 documentary, “You were put into a barrack, where people died. The straw that you laid down was full of whatever came out of their bodies . . . It didn’t take twenty-four hours for your body to get covered with lice.”
By the time she was liberated by the British in 1945,
Feldman was suffering from pneumonia and pleurisy and was injured by an
explosion set by the Germans who were trying to destroy the camp. She moved to
the US in 1947 when she learned she had an aunt living in New York and became
an X-ray technician.
She was married in 1953 and had a son and a daughter, each
of whom was named for her parents. Years later, she began telling children her
story to educate them about the Holocaust.
Feldman explained in a 2017 interview: “It is important
for me to remember that six million of my fellow Jews were slaughtered, and a
million and a half of those victims were children. I am here and I firmly
believe it is because God wanted me to survive and be here and tell the free
world what an uncaring world did to its fellow human beings.”
Her son is now a doctor working on the front lines of the
coronavirus pandemic in New Jersey. Her husband, Harvey, is hospitalized for
COVID-19.
On Tuesday, one day before the seventy-fifth anniversary of her liberation, Margit Buchhalter Feldman died of complications from COVID-19. She was ninety years old.
Choosing a legacy that matters
Those of us who did not experience the Holocaust cannot truly understand its horrors.
I have led more than thirty study tours to Israel; each…
… Read More
—
Click Read More to read the rest of the story from our content source/partners – Denison Forum.