Survivors of the Holocaust: Diaries & Personal Stories From Non-Vewish Victims

Last Updated: Friday, September 15, 2017

Wiktor: The Art of Survival - "Opening the envelope, Julian Siminski felt a chill."
Krystyna was a rather spoiled teenager when the war broke out in Poland. She was upset because she had to leave her affluent boarding school in Switzerland. But, she soon found courage beyond her years. I Am First a Human Being: The Prison Letters of Krystyna Wituska By Irene Tomaszewski - Available at Amazon.com.
Irek - From the Underground "Irek" was his code name. But most people knew him as Tadeusz Borowski. Only the Polish resistance fighters knew him by his pseudonym.

Polish Translation: "Irek" byl jego pseudonimem. Wiekszosc ludzi znala go jako Tadeusz Borowski. Ale dla czlonkow ruchu oporu byl "Irkiem" z pseudonimu, a w rzeczywistosci podporucznikiem Armii Krajowej.
Forgotten Survivors - Polish Christians Remember the Nazi Occupation - Compiled and edited by Professor Richard C. Lukas. Individual stories of 28 Christians who lived through the horrors. She was only a little girl when she began to see how much the Nazis could hate. Today, Bozenna Urbanowicz-Gilbride devotes most of her time and effort to visiting schools and telling her story to the children, many of whom are the same age she was during the time of her forced labor."
Jan Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust By E. Thomas Wood
This is an amazing, almost hard-to-believe true story of a Polish officer smuggled into Great Britain and then the United States to plead for help for the Jews. Read more from The New York Times, July 2000
French survivor describes his months of hell in concentration camp Mittelbau Dora in Nordhausen
April 4, 1945: "We smelled an odor. ....there was a rumor that the Nazis were keeping prisoners in a labor camp. Something was telling me that the odor had something to do with the prisoners...
Dutch Teenager - Toine de Rond
The verdict was three years of hard labor in a strafarbeitslager - for listening to the wrong radio station in Nazi-Occupied Holland. Dutch Version
Eva Choma Pencak - Catholic Holocaust Survivor
Born in Bilgoraj, Eva Choma was a young single woman when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. She spent the next several years as a forced laborer in Nazi-occupied Germany
Kidnaped and Deported - Polish Catholic victim remembers
Story of Teenagers: He was was a skinny teenager in war-torn Poland when Julian Bilecki and his family helped hide 23 Jews in an underground bunker, saving them from Nazi death squads. More ...
She Hid Jews Inside a German Officers' Villa - Irene was a teenager when the Nazi attack on Poland changed her life forever. She was separated from her family, escaped twice from incarceration, and was captured and raped by Soviet soldiers.
Her most difficult predicament was also her noblest: she saved the lives of 16 Polish Jews, hiding some of them literally beneath the noses of the German officers. More...
Jan Komski, Washington Post Artist and Survivor of 5 Concentration Camps
Growing up Black in Nazi Germany
By Hans J. Massaquoi
One beautiful summer morning in 1934, I arrived at school to hear our 3rd-grade teacher, Herr Grimmelshauser, inform the class that Herr Wriede, our schulleiter (principal), had ordered the entire student body and faculty to assemble in the schoolyard.