SURVIVOR STORIES
Robert Wagemann
Robert Wagemann was born in 1937 in Mannheim, Germany. Robert and his family were Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Nazis regarded Jehovah’s Witnesses as enemies of the state for their refusal to take an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, or to serve in the German army. Robert’s family continued its religious activities despite Nazi persecution. Shortly before Robert’s birth, his mother was imprisoned briefly for distributing religious materials. Robert’s hip was injured during delivery, leaving him with a disability. When Robert was five years, he was ordered to report for a physical in Schlierheim. His mother overheard staff comments about putting Robert “to sleep.” Fearing they intended to kill him, Robert’s mother grabbed him and ran from the clinic. Nazi physicians had begun systematic killing of those they deemed physically and mentally disabled in the fall of …
Ceija Stojka
Ceija was the fifth of six children born to Roman Catholic Gypsy parents. The Stojka’s family wagon traveled with a caravan that spent winters in the Austrian capital of Vienna and summers in the Austrian countryside. The Stojka’s belonged to a tribe of Gypsies called the Lowara Roma, who made their living as itinerant horse traders.
“I grew up used to freedom, travel and hard work. Once, my father made me a skirt out of some material from a broken sunshade. I was 5 years old and our wagon was parked for the winter in a Vienna campground, when Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. The Germans ordered us to stay put. My parents had to convert our wagon into a wooden house, and we had to learn how to cook with an oven instead of on an open fire.”…
Wilhelm Heckmann
Wilhelm Heckmann was a German concert and easy listening musician. From 1937 to 1945 he was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps in Dachau and Mauthausen. Heckmann founded the first prisoner band In Mauthausen, and was also instrumental in the founding of the large prisoner orchestra there. The son of innkeeper Adolf Heckmann, Willi Heckmann grew up in the public house environs of Altena (Westphalia). During World War I, he served in the Patriotic Emergency Services and the military. After the war, Heckmann studied vocals and piano with Otto Laugs at the state conservatory in Hagen (Westphalia)…
Veronika Elenska Young
Veronika Elenska suffered through the regimes of the Communists and the Nazis. The first eighteen years of her life were spent working hard for others who treated her cruelly. She lost her home and she lost her family. But she lived. She survived to tell a story of evil –and a story of hope and faith.
“I was about seventy miles from my parents’ home, but after I was about ten years old, I would take a train home sometimes, maybe once every month or two months, for the weekend. My father continued working as a tailor, sewing and doing things, so they weren’t too poor. I didn’t have involvement with anyone outside the orphanage, and I don’t remember anybody from there, it’s been so long and so much went on.”…
Natalia Orloff-Klauer
I will always remember the war years of my childhood. Though we survived the Holocaust, my parents and siblings have not escaped the pain.
In 1941, the Nazi invaded Ukraine, my Motherland, and their objective was to annihilate the Ukrainians not to liberate them. Like Joseph Stalin in 1932-33 tried to kill the Ukrainians by starvation. My 2 older sisters and my aunt (who was 12 years old) barely survived that horror. We lived in Tomakovka at that time. As the Germans invaded untold thousands of civilians were rounded up, shot and buried in mass graves…