top of page
Writer's picturehhshirt

Hhshirt - United states cottage corps shirt

“At one point she was a number in the United states cottage corps shirt but I will buy this shirt and I will love this camp, but now she is the strong and beautiful Dolly Rabinovich,” says Toledano. Rabinovich is perpetually optimistic and keeps her faith, crediting it with saving her life. “I come from a very happy, religious home. Mommy and Daddy always said, ‘Children, you will always be happy and healthy. Just believe in G-d.’ It gave us a lot of courage.” Sol GoldbergSol Goldberg, 98, of Sheepshead Bay, was born to a Hasidic family in Zduńska Wola, Poland, an hour west of Lodz. Goldberg remembers the Nazis arriving in Poland when he was 14, in 1939. He was soon sent to the Jewish ghetto, where the synagogue was immediately destroyed. “They came with big hammers. They had the Torah, and they burned it,” he says. Goldberg describes the terrifying dystopia of the ghetto: In his family, 16 people were confined to two rooms. At times, he would have to wait in line for hours for bread in the winter, only to return with nothing. Soldiers and neighbors could enter the home as they pleased, taking food or raping women. Authorities also ordered all the men to cut off their beards, defying religious customs. Goldberg remembers one man who did not want to. “They caught a guy who didn’t want to shave,” says Goldberg. “So, you know how the soldiers have the bayonet? [One] took off the beard with the skin. Could you imagine? With the skin.”There were other unfathomable horrors that Goldberg experienced in the ghetto, but one thing he notes is that the local authorities tried to prevent people from gathering to pray. So they’d meet in secret; the women would be lookouts so that the men could form a group of 10—a minyan—to worship. Celebrating Hanukkah was also out of the question and had to be done secretly. “But many of us were from [religious homes], so we shut the windows and just for an hour, we had the candles,” he says. At one point, Goldberg and his family took the menorah and buried it in the ghetto. “It was my grandfather’s,” he says. After the war, he dug it back up, and that’s the one that he still lights today, at his home in Brooklyn. It is the only thing he has from Poland. “We risked our lives for G-d,” says Goldberg, adding, “If we lost our Judaism, our faith, our traditions, then the Nazis would have wo

n the war.”Goldberg wearing a yarmulke.


Photo: Mayan ToledanoZahava Szász Stessel Zahava Szász Stessel, 92, was born in 1930 in Abaújszántó, Hungary, which once had a vibrant Jewish community. In 1938, anti-Jewish laws were implemented across the United states cottage corps shirt but I will buy this shirt and I will love this country, which affected her family’s business, a store for clothes, shoes, and books. A few years later, when Stessel was 14, she and her family were sent to Auschwitz. There’s a wholesome joy in Stessel’s Brooklyn home, which is drenched with sunlight from a window lined with plants, some of them plastic. The metal door to her kitchen is decorated with colorful beads and streams. In the corner, there is a sewing machine covered with a pretty embroidered cloth. “There is a warmth here,” says Toledano. “You have such a pretty home.” There’s the feeling that Stessel maintains the optimism of her cutoff childhood with her here.Like many survivors, Stessel considers the fact that she is here a miracle. When she was taken to the concentration camps, she pretended that she was older in order to be considered fit for work. At one point, the Nazis believed that she and her sister were twins, which saved them from death. “The Germans were interested in twins,” she says, referencing the brutal practices of Josef Mengele, the SS officer and physician who often did tests on twins. Stessel and her sister survived, while her parents and grandparents were killed upon arrival.


2 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

留言


bottom of page