Meet Our Holocaust Survivors

Regina Altars Behar was born in Skopje, Macedonia (then part of Yugoslavia) in April 1936. Together with her parents, she fled from the mountains to Italy, and later traveled by a small boat to a refugee camp. Approximately 200 people were housed there, where they were kept in a secured area for their protection until they were eventually released.

Saul Blau was born in Tarpa, Hungary on December 17,1930 to an observant Jewish family with seven children. From a young age, he experienced antisemitism from his classmates and teachers in school. He recalled that his parents tried to shield him and his siblings from this antisemitism as best as they could. The German army occupied Hungary in March 1944, and shortly after, the deportation of the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began. On the last day of Passover, Saul and his family were removed from their home and sent to a larger city before their deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Rodi Waterman Glass was born in 1936 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, into a large Jewish family with a successful family business. When she was four, Germany invaded the Netherlands, and she remembers the sound of Nazi soldiers marching through her neighborhood. Jews were soon forced to register, obey strict curfews, and surrender many of their freedoms.

Allan Hall was born in 1935 in Krakow, Poland. When German troops entered Krakow, Allan’s family fled on foot more than 200 miles to Lwow (now Lviv, Ukraine), which was then under Soviet occupation. After the Germans invaded the Soviet-controlled region in 1941, Jews in Lwow were forced into ghettos under increasingly brutal conditions.

Dr. Miriam Klein Kassenoff was born in Košice in 1936. Her father, Rabbi Maurice Klein, was taken to a Hungarian forced labor camp in December 1940 but managed to escape. After his escape, her parents decided it was time to leave.

Lawrence McColm was born Marcel Fachler in Antwerp, Belgium, on September 3, 1939. At 18 months old, following the German invasion of Belgium, he was placed in an orphanage on the border of Belgium and France that was run by Christian women and Catholic priests. From May 1941 to March 1944, he was hidden there under a false identity.

Judy Rodan was born in 1938 in Berehove, then part of Czechoslovakia. She lived with her family in a middle-class Jewish household and had a younger brother. In May 1944, when Judy was about six years old, her entire family was deported to Auschwitz. Before the deportation, however, Judy’s grandmother, who ran a wooden barrel factory, arranged for her to be smuggled to safety.

Wendy Reiss Rothfield was two years old when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, and her father’s business was confiscated and given to local non-Jewish citizens. Wendy later recalled hearing the chaos of Kristallnacht as a young child. After Kristallnacht, her parents made the difficult decision to leave Austria.

Laszlo Selly was born on December 31, 1937, in Budapest, Hungary. As anti-Jewish laws intensified, Laszlo’s family was forced into a “Yellow Star House” in 1944, when Jews in Budapest were confined to urban buildings marked with the yellow star and subjected to increasing restrictions.

Jack Waksal was born Yitzhak Waksal on September 15, 1924, in Jedlinsk, Poland, where he lived with his parents, brother, and two sisters. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the Nazis, with help from the Poles, burned the town’s synagogue, and established the Jedlinsk Ghetto. Jack and his family were later deported to the Kruszyna forced labor camp. As the camp was liquidated, Jack’s father, mother, and two sisters were murdered.