Jewish Holocaust SurvivorInterview language: SpanishJaime Vandor remembers March 19, 1944, the day the Germans invaded Hungary. He states he was taking a walk with his mother, Anna Vandor, on one of the main streets of Budapest when they ran into his father’s cousin who was then living in the smaller town of Mágocs. This cousin invited Jaime and his brother Enrique to come live with her family in Mágocs, which she considered safer for the Jews than Budapest at the time.

Josef Feingold describes in Spanish, his decision for not boarding the ship “Struma” on December 12 1941, set to sail from Constanta, Romania, en route to British Mandate Palestine, for fear the ship was unsafe and too overcrowded for the journey. He relates that, with almost 800 refugees on board, the Struma reached Istanbul, Turkey but it was not allowed to land. Instead, it was anchored offshore thus forcing the passengers to stay on board for several weeks. The Struma was finally set adrift, but was torpedoed and it sank off the coast of Sile, Turkey, on February 24, 1942.

Jewish Holocaust Survivor Interview language: Spanish Ana Benkel de Vinocur describes her first impressions of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau Concentration Camp upon arrival from the Lódz Ghetto in May 1944. She remembers her reaction when the heavy doors of the deportation train opened and she saw prisoners, in striped uniforms, bald, looking like skeletons. She speaks of the seizure of all her belongings and of a selection process in which she remained with her mother, but was separated from her father and brother.

Jewish Holocaust Survivor Interview language: Spanish

Called Gypsy, Tsigan, Gitane, Cygane, Zigeuner, the Roma people have wandered the world for a thousand years—their mysterious origins a source of fascination as well as suspicion. They’ve been romanticized but also brutally persecuted by the more settled and orderly cultures they’ve traveled through and enriched.

Growing up, it wasn’t terribly unusual to see people in our house with telltale tattoos on their arms. We kids somehow knew what those blurry inked numbers meant, but we also knew it wasn’t polite to ask about them. And so, I never did. And honestly, no one in my family had been so marked — the people with tattoos were mostly friends of my grandparents — so it wasn’t something I had a lot of interest in hearing about. And perhaps in an effort to protect our innocence, family elders showed no interest in talking about it.