[Yad Vashem] On Monday evening, Israel will begin to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day. Six torches will be lit at Yad Vashem in memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. These are the torchlighters - who survived the Holocaust as children and lost their entire families: Identical twin sisters Iudit Barnea and Lia Huber from Transylvania suffered the infamous medical experiments of Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. Mirjam Schuster from Moldova was imprisoned with her family at Balki, where out of more than 10,000 inmates, only a few hundred survived. Esther Debora Reiss-Mossel from Holland was sent to Bergen-Belsen at age six. Solomon Feigerson from Latvia survived numerous execution operations and labor camps. As the Germans gathered Jews in the ghetto's central square and shot them one by one, Shimon Greenhouse from Belarus and his father, Yekutiel, stood there, their hands clasped. When Yekutiel was shot, he dragged his young son down with him, and Shimon remained beneath his dead father, dazed and covered with blood, for a full day. Lea Paz from Poland was pushed by her mother, Gusta, out through a narrow opening in the side of a train car carrying them to the Belzec death camp.
2009-04-20 06:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive