Eyewitness to
the Holocaust and World War II
Voices & Stories of an Era
Civilians
Jaqueline Winowich
Cries
Jaqueline Winowich was a young girl when Germany invaded France. Her father joined the Resistance and the entire family aided the Allies as much as they could. Like too many children across Europe, Jacqueline witnessed the confusion, helplessness, and horrors of war—her innocent childhood deeply affected by unforgettable acts of inhumanity.
After all these years, these shocking memories remain, as when during a visit to her grandmother’s village she learned that local Jews were being rounded up and shipped away from a nearby railway station. To this day she can still hear their plaintiff cries drifting up from the train depot and echoing across the rooftops.
Historians estimate that during the Nazi occupation of France, nearly 76,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps in French freight cars between 1942 and 1944. Only 3,000 souls may have survived.
Edith Stein
I Feel Guilty for Surviving
Edith Stein, 97, of Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania is a Holocaust survivor. Born and raised within a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, she remembers a slow rise of social bigotry and cultural brutality against Jews and others deemed “undesirable.” Fascism’s grip on Europe then, as now, she contemplates, was inspired. People learned to hate their neighbors, friends, and countrymen if they were identified as enemies of the state. Sensing the inevitable in 1938, Edith’s parents sent her and her brother to the United States for safe keeping with relatives. Edith would never see them again. “I couldn’t do anything for my parents,” she laments. “I feel guilty for surviving.”
Judah Samet
Camp Survivor
Judah Samet (1938-2022) was a Hungarian-American businessman, speaker, and Holocaust survivor. At the age of six, he and his family were taken from Debrecen, Hungary, to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they spent eleven months.
After the Second World War the family immigrated to Israel, where he subsequently served in the Israel Defense Forces and worked as a teacher. He later moved to Canada and then to the United States.
Pittsburgh synagogue shooting
On October 27, 2018, eleven Jews were killed and seven injured in a mass shooting during Shabbat services at the Tree of Life building, marking the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. Judah Samet was four or five minutes late to the service because he had been delayed by his housekeeper. When he pulled into a handicapped spot on the parking lot, he was approached by a man who told him to leave due to the active shooter. Before pulling out of the parking lot unharmed, Samet had a clear vision of the shooting exchange between the gunman and a police officer.
I was flushed with (memories of) the concentration camp. It kind of descended on me. And I was thinking to myself, “It never ends, it never ends for my family.” Whoever thought when you come to America, you’re gonna go through the same thing all over again?
— Judah Samet, in Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (2018)