Holocaust Testimony

Brigitte Altman was born in 1924, and in Memel, Lithuania. Her family was very wealthy in the 1900’s but the village they lived in was burned down during WWI and the family lost everything. She was a much pampered child before WWII. She described a very classic idea of Christmas Sleigh rides before the war. She said that she had a very happy childhood. They were on the list to get out of their country, but it was a very long list and unlikely that they would be able to leave. When the Germans occupied Memel in 1939, they left to stay with her gr4andmother in her village. They left everything they owned behind except for some things that they had shipped to her grandmother’s village, but the container caught on fire. They stayed there a month or two and then relocated to a town where she could go to school and her parents could get visas for their family to go to the United States. The soviets took over her country in 1940; her family had already lost all of their financial wealth which was a good thing because the Russians shipped off other wealthy Jewish families to Siberia. They had an opportunity to escape to Canada but could not do it because her mother had a stroke and was to sick to make the trip. When the Germans invaded Kovno the Russians were panicked and left quickly. She said “At least when we lived under the Soviets we knew that our lives were safe but rumors were going around about the German slave and death camps”. At this time they had to wear the Star of David on the sleeves and were not aloud to walk on the sidewalks. She described the Jewish ghetto as very poor, the families often lived in one room. They had nothing to trade for a place to stay; they lived only on the kindness of strangers and finally found an attic space to live in. She worked in a labor brigade; it was assigned to her to work in a green house that catered to high ranking German soldiers. Other work groups had worse conditions. October of 1941 10000 were taken from the ghetto. She remembered waiting in review for the German S.S. sergeant in the square in her father’s work groups that built the airport with her mother and father. “He yielded enormous power, the power over life and death”. She described him eating a sandwich as he separated those who would live and who would die. She talks about after liberation living on a farm with the family of a Russian soldier and that he had tried to rape her many times but each time she was able to fight him off. She remembers a Russian office named Ficelli that became her protector and would not let any harm come to her. He was named as a Russian commandant and left the farm. Two women that knew how good he was to her gave her all the food and drink that they could spare, and set her up with a horse and drive and helped her to get away.

1. “At least when we lived under the Soviets we knew that our lives were safe but rumors were going around about the German slave and death camps”
2. “He yielded enormous power, the power over life and death”