Ursula Levy-Jason Florez

Jason Florez
Comp-102 10/11/11
Larry Neuburger
Ursula Levy
Ursula Levy was born May 11th, 1935 in Osnabruck, Germany. Her father and uncle were sent to a concentration camp and then died shortly after being released. When she was about 4 her mother wrote to another uncle who lived in America desperately seeking a safe place to send her children. Her uncle wrote back speaking of a connection he had in Holland. So her mother sent her and her brother George who was 5 years older to a convent for undernourished children in Holland. She spent approximately 4 years there and was eventually sent to a concentration camp. For the next couple years she bounced around to 4 or 5 different camps. At one camp a man named Mr. Van Mecklenburg came and visited her on her birthday. He told the Nazis in charge that her father was Catholic and lived in America, which of course was a lie. But this lie was one of the best things that could happen to her because it placed her in a part of the camp for privileged Jews who were treated better than the rest. She explained how one camp was surrounded by electric, barbed wire fences and men with large rifles stood on the inside and outside of these fences all around. She spoke of how she tried to keep to herself and maintain a low profile at these camps, which is one reason she think she survived them. Finally, on April 10th, 1945 she was put on a train in which she spent 13 days on. The train would stop for sometimes days but the Jewish children would always come back to the train, it wouldn’t even cross their mind to escape even though they probably could have if they tried. And then one day she heard someone shouting, “We’re free, we’re free.” At first no one really paid any attention. Then she saw Russian soldiers taking the German soldiers hostage, that’s when she knew the war was over. But she would still have to live with the atrocities she endured during the 2 years she was in centration camps. And now that she was free, she was alone, no friends or family left. She was happy to be free but sad to have nothing and nothing to look forward to. It was as if she was beginning a new life.
“Walking around in a striped suit completely depersonalizes you.”
“A crumb of bread meant the difference between life and death.”