Sunday, March 17, 2013

Devon Bennett Testimony #1


Devon Bennett

Mr. Neuburger

English 102-118

17 March 2013

Survivor Testimony

“Malka Baran”

            Malka Baran was born in Warsaw Poland in 1927 to a Jewish family that did not celebrate the Jewish culture as most did.  They were a family that did not follow the religion closely.  They moved when she was one year old to Czestochowa Poland were she spent the next 14 years of her life.  She had a brother that was two years younger than her and they lived a very simple life. 

            She found out later that her grandparents were killed and her father stopped believing in God as much after that loss.  In 1929 she said that the lives of her family changed.  The SS officers came into town and put rules and regulation of the Jews.  Their apartment was turned into a ghetto and they did not go to school and more they worked for the Germans.  Shortly after in 41 she was awaken by her parents early one morning and they went into the street where she her brother and her father were separated from their mother and they never saw her again.  They were taken to another place to work and she didn’t remember the name. 

            Soon after her mother was taken her father and brother were working on the railroads and were both shot in the back and killed.  She immediately put a block on her memory and literally can’t remember anything until she was sent to a concentration camp in 43.  This concentration camp she stayed in until 45 when liberation came.  She was always very good with children and so she decided to help children who were displaced with the war.  She soon met her future husband who she thought of as a brother before she moved to Israel.  After moving to Israel he came back from the United States to ask her to marry him and she did however she because of her paper work could not move to the United States until 10 months later.  When she did they lived in Brooklyn and had children.

1.      “…I survived that’s what I remembered…”

2.      “Germans shot people all around me and threw babies against walls and after that I don’t remember anything.”

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