In my line of work as a CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant), I come across many residents who have stories to tell about their past. Some who have lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the other wars of the past? Some even lived during War World I. Listen to all the stories on how they survived the war, and how they grew up is always interesting.
While working one night I hear one of my residents cry out in her sleep," Mommy where are you, I can't find you!" Now I know her mind had been taken by Alzheimer's, and they usually call for their mother’s. Until the nurse told me that this one resident was a child of the Holocaust, and that she is re-living everything that has happen to her in the past.
In that moment I wanted to cry! Cry for her pain and the pain of others like her, who have to have the memories of losing their whole family in a very inhumane way. Even thou I do not know how her family died, but I can only image it wasn't on their own accord. As a child she didn't get to play with her friends and family. She didn't get to make memories of good times while she was young. No she probably spent time hiding from the enemy, and watching her whole family be killed.
Killed by the hands of a leader who was half Jewish. "The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community."Untied States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Six million Jew's where killed in the Holocaust. Holocaust is a word from the Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire". Many men, women, and child where either gassed, shot in a mass grave, or put in ovens. Some were worked to death and with almost no food. They would demised them and belittle them to make it known that a Jew was a rat. Many who had many members in their family, where the only ones left.
It makes me sad that my resident has to go thru the horrible things she had witnessed as child, again as an old women. Now hearing her cries, I listen more closely and I just want to cry and take her pain away. No one should ever go thru what she went through. No one! I pray to God, that one day she will see her family again in heaven and that her mind will be at ease, with no more nightmares and screaming out for her lost loved ones.
These are pictures of real children of the Holocaust! Most of the children that where able to surive, where hiden. Some where not so lucky.
Here are real stories of how some children where able to surive the Holocaust.
http://www.adl.org/children_holocaust/children_main1.asp
