Jeanette Holocaust Survivor Testimony
Jeanette was born in Vienna in 1923 and grew up there with her sister, Irma. During Kristallnacht, her family’s fabric shop—half wood, half glass—stayed dark and silent after a warning to keep the door shut; the children were told not to go near it. Soon after, her parents sent her to an aunt in Belgium for safety.
At sixteen in Brussels, she repeatedly slipped past the Gestapo—once by asking to take her kitten downstairs, then jumping onto a crowded trolley as strangers urged the driver not to stop.
On April 1 she was denounced, arrested, and deported to Auschwitz, where she was tattooed and assigned to the Kanada Commando, bundling coats and sorting stolen belongings. She found small ways to resist: damaging good garments so they wouldn’t be reused and disposing of jewelry so the Nazis wouldn’t profit. Food was meager—a scrap of bread, a dab of margarine, thin soup.
When the camp emptied, she layered blouse, sweater, and jacket despite orders, slipped away during the death march, and, with fluent German and fair features, passed as non-Jewish to reach safety. After the war she learned her parents and sister were gone. A cousin helped her immigrate to the United States, where she built a family whose names now fill her home. At 101 in New York City, she shares her story so the world remembers.
