Quietly, they hid ‒ and feared for their lives.
Eight-year-old Marcel Drimer, his little sister and their mother lay down on a stretch of ground where a wheat field met a line of trees. The forest was some 300 meters from the neighborhood they’d just been warned to leave in Drohobycz, Poland. An “aktion” was taking place in town, and if the Germans found them, they’d deport them to a concentration camp and kill their hosts.
Marcel’s mother wore a raincoat the same color as the grain among which they hid; she spread it over them as best she could, and they waited. An hour or so later, they heard it, the aktion: Shouting, dogs barking, people screaming. “You know,” Marcel said, “people dying.”
For three to four hours, they heard what Marcel and his sister call “the concert of death.” Then, it began to rain, and the horrible sounds quieted. The three waited another hour before they got up and made their way to the home of their nanny, whom they’d been visiting. As they neared the house, they saw a German soldier with his dog. “He looked at us,” Marcel recounted to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“He saw my mother, my sister and me. He just stopped for a moment, turned around and walked away. This was a miracle.”
Had the guard been with another soldier, neither could have turned away. Each would fear the other would turn him in.
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Marcel said his story of surviving the Holocaust includes several close calls and miracles. He and his family endured and later escaped from the Drohobycz Ghetto. Afterward, they hid in secret bunkers, fled to a small village, hid in a barn, and survived winter in a hole in the ground to avoid capture. Two years after Marcel and his sister heard the “concert of death,” the family was liberated by the Soviet army.
Marcel had grown so weak from hunger and deprivation that he could no longer stand. At 10 years old, his legs wouldn’t hold him, and he had to learn to walk again. Marcel regained his health, finished high school and went on to study engineering in college. In 1961, he immigrated to the United States, where he serves today as a volunteer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The Holocaust
The Holocaust began with boycotts and book burnings. Soon Jewish people lost their rights to work, vote and own property. They were stripped of their homes, their freedom and their dignity. Organized propaganda greased the gears of the Nazi persecution machine. It persuaded the masses toward prejudice and passivity, then hatred and aggression.
Jewish people who didn’t evade capture were rounded up like animals and deported to either death camps, where they were summarily murdered, or to work camps. At the work camps, they were subjected to slave labor, brutal living conditions, freezing temperatures, hideous experiments and cruelties beyond comprehension.
Millions of stories
Six million Jewish people died in the Holocaust. Millions of non-Jews died as well. Each person killed is a unique story. Each survivor is another. The Holocaust is a dark collection of tens of millions of personal stories of suffering, trauma and tragedy. During the Holocaust, the worst of the human race had free expression. Evil was unleashed, and the depth to which man’s depravity can sink was revealed in horrifying detail. The possibility that mankind is capable of such ideology and actions is sobering and frightening.
Never forget
That’s why we can never forget the Holocaust. We must never turn our heads from remembering the victims and honoring the survivors. January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is the anniversary of the 1944 liberation of Auschwitz, the infamous death camp where 1.1 million people were killed, 90% of them Jewish. We remember, and with our deepest respect, we honor those who died and those who survived the Holocaust.
