FAIRVIEW — “I am a survivor. Anything you hear today, I went through, anything you hear today is true.”

Rita Hirsch has lived through atrocities no one came even dream about. Hirsch, now 77-years-old, was just seven-years-old when Germans came and forced her family into concentration camps.

In 1941 the war broke out. Hirsch and her family were alerted by a man who worked for her father that something bad was happening.

“Someone came and told my father to be prepared, something is going on,” she said. “It didn’t take too long, maybe 15 minutes, and another man came and told us to move.”

After gathering up a few belongings, the family, Rita, her siblings, parents and grandmother, were on the move.

“My father didn’t want to scare us, but he said I don’t think we will return to this house,” she said. “I still didn’t realize what was going on, but we followed my parents.”

The family went into the forest to hide.

“Most of the walking was done at night,” she said.

The family sought refuge at a family friend’s house. At first, the family would not open the door, but after Rita’s mom offered her jewelry, they let them in.

“You have to leave immediately, the Germans are coming,” they were told by their friends.

Hirsch went back into the woods, traveling to their grandparents house in another town.

“In the forest, they captured us,” she said. “They separated us. We never made it to my grandparents.”

When the Germans found them, Hirsch held tightly to her mom.

“They grabbed her and beat her,” she said.

After being separated from her family, she walked for days with little to no food.

“Looking around me sometimes, I thought I didn’t need to live like that,” she said.

Soon, she arrived at a train station. The guards continued to tell their prisoners there was something better.

“They told us it was a better place where they were taking us.”

She was thrown onto the cattle car by the braids of her hair.

“The noises, the crying,” she said. “There was no room. It was terrible. That’s what I had to do for four days. I still don’t know how I survived it.”

They arrived at a camp.

“They shot thousands of kids in front of me.”

After arriving at the camp, Hirsch was already terribly sick from all the diseases on the train ride.

“When I came to this camp, I was more dead than alive. I was a skeleton. I went through hell.”

One evening, while laying in the corner of the room where she slept, a man came and picked up Hirsch.

“He said keep you mouth shut,” she said. “I will try to save you, but your going to have to help. You’re going to have to play dead.”

He put her under some hay to hide her while passing the guards.

“I almost died behind this hay,” she said. “He picked me up and started running.”

The next thing she saw was two large gates opening.

“It was a place for nuns. He gave me to the nuns.”

She still doesn’t know why the German wanted to save her, but she is thankful every day he did.

From 1943 to 1945, she stayed in a bunker at the nuns’ house.

“I was so sick. I couldn’t eat, I was laying there. I couldn’t stand up, I had to go to the bathroom on myself.”

She stayed there for two years until she was liberated.

After her liberation by the Russians, the nuns put her on the outside of their gates.

“They said I was on my own. Where was a child going? I was a skeleton.”

Even though she was liberated, Hirsch still had many struggles. She lay on the side of the street until someone came by and helped her.

Eventually, she made her way to a Red Cross shelter.

“They said I was now safe. They tried to give me the best to try to get me going,” she said.

After being there several days, Hirsch recalled a naked and sickly looking man who walked in the room.

“A man called my name, she said. “It was my dad. He had no leg and was very sick.”

Days later he passed away. She never saw any other family members again.

Hirsch wants everyone to know what she and millions of others faced.

“It happened, and it could happen,” she said. “This country is still the best. We have to make sure no Hitler comes again. As long as I live, I make sure people know what happened.”

She met and married a Holocaust survivor and they now live in Irondale and travel, speaking to students everywhere.

“I came to this country to give my children an education,” she said. “It’s the best country in the world. “

Students in the auditorium stood to their feet at the end of the presentation.

“It was very interesting, sad but interesting,” said Parkside seventh-grader Nicholas Thompson.

Mason Smith, Parkside eighth-grader, said this gave him a chance to hear a true story about the Holocaust, not just read about it.

“It was really touching to hear,” he said. “It was nice to have somebody talk that really went through it.”

“The eighth-graders read The Diary of Ann Frank the play and just needed a frame of reference,” said Jacy Thompson Douglas, seventh- and eighth-grade English teacher at Parkside School.



* Tiffany Green can be reached by e-mail at tgreen@cullmantimes.com or by telephone at 734-2131, ext. 220.