Auschwitz Survivor: Being Alive Is The Best ‘Revenge’

TEL AVIV, Israel Shortly after the Nazi invasion of what was then Hungary in May 1944, Renee Ganz’s family and most of the 25,000 Jews in the city of Oradea were forced into cattle cars and transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

Men and boys were placed in one line, while women and girls were led to another. Ganz was just 15 at the time.

“I asked a German soldier why we were being separated and he said, ‘You’ve had a long journey. You need to take a shower,’” Ganz, now 86, recalled. “That’s when the selection began.”

German officers took one look at the prisoners and decided who would live and who would die.

Lindenbaum, who will attend the Auschwitz ceremony in Poland, said the anti-Semitism that fueled the Holocaust survives today.

“After 70 years a Jew still can’t walk freely on the streets of Europe without fearing for his life,” he said, referring to many assaults there, including the terror attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris this month that left four Jews dead.

Ganz agreeds: “Anti-Semitism will be around for another thousand years.” For her, traveling to Auschwitz is about getting “revenge,” she said.

“I have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The Germans tried to kill the entire Jewish people but they failed. I am alive. I am here.”

The Huffington Post