‘I didn’t know why they wanted me dead’: Reflections from three Holocaust survivors in Texas

Eighty years ago today, soldiers from the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front opened the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp and liberated 7,000 prisoners.

The anniversary is now marked as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This often includes speeches by Holocaust survivors, though as the years go on, there are fewer survivors living to share their stories.

However, there are still a number of survivors in Texas who are willing to speak. Here are three of their stories.

‘I didn’t know why they wanted me dead’

Rosian Zerner was born in 1935 in Kaunas, Lithuania.

“I had a very privileged life before the war,” she said. “We had servants. So we had a 1935 Ford with a three-digit license plate because in Lithuania they didn’t have many cars.”

Rosian Bagriansky picks a flower outside on the farm of her rescuer Lidija Goluboviene.
Photo courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

When Zerner was 6, the Nazis invaded her hometown, and she and her family were confined to the Kovno Ghetto.

“We didn’t know what to expect. We didn’t know why we were there. And they gave us like a 10-by-10 place to sleep. We were crawling over each other’s bed in one of the slums of Kovno,” she said. “No heat, no running water, of course, no sewerage or anything like that. I remember trying to melt some snow and get it to my lips before it froze again.”

Zerner’s parents risked their lives to dig a hole under the ghetto’s fence. Zerner was passed between various rescuers – from a Catholic orphanage to a widowed farmer – before reuniting with her parents when they were able to escape the ghetto as well.

“It was really a very surreal kind of existence because I didn’t know why they wanted me dead. I was trying to be a good girl,” she said. “And the memories are still there about fear and mistrust. And the little joys that could happen during my very unusual childhood.”

‘We marched all day’

Bill Orlin was born in 1932 in the town of Brok, Poland. Even after escaping his occupied hometown, Orlin and his family were rounded up with the other Jewish residents in a nearby city.

“We marched all day until we got to a certain spot in a clearing in the forest, on the highway, when they told us to line up single-file and face a machine gun with two German soldiers,” he said. “We were facing the machine guns for about, I don’t know, 15 or 30 minutes maybe. And then they let us go.”

Bill Orlin, left, and his family at a displaced persons camp in Fritzlar Germany in 1947.
Photo courtesy of Holocaust Museum Houston

However, during the march, a group of German soldiers approached Orlin’s grandfather.

“One of the soldiers produced the scissor and cut his beard. My grandfather protested and said to the German soldier, ‘How can you do this to me? I’m a man of God. I’m a religious person. This beard means so much to me,’” Orlin said. “So he got slapped and the German told him – the first time I ever heard those words, and I never forgot them – he said to my grandfather, ‘Gott mit Uns.’ It means in German,’ God is with us.’”

Throughout the war, Orlin’s family spent time in Belarus, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. After the fighting stopped, his family tried to go back to Poland but found there was still a lot of antisemitism. So at the age of 16, Orlin moved with his parents and brothers to Canada before eventually moving to Houston.

“After being here for 15 months, I was drafted into the Army,” he said. “I was occupied by the Germans when I was seven. I was sent back to Germany to occupy the Germans when I was 21.”

‘All that time, I waited for them to come home’

Ruth Steinfeld lived in Germany before the war broke out and remembers having what she called “a modern family.” Her father was a businessman and rode a motorcycle. Her mother cooked for shabbat on Friday nights, and her family went to temple on Saturday mornings.

On Oct. 20, 1940, Steinfeld’s mother went to see if the family had been approved for immigration out of Germany.

Ruth Steinfeld, left, with her sister Lea Weems and their mother in Ladenburg, Germany, in 1936.
Photo courtesy of Holocaust Museum Houston

“She told us not to open the door for anyone. And the Nazis came banging on that door. And we looked outside and my parents had already been picked up and were standing on the truck,” Steinfeld said. “My mother was saying, it’s okay for us to come. And we were put on the truck. And the next day we were taken to the  southwest part of France, a concentration camp called Gurs.”

Steinfeld’s mother connected with an aid organization that was rescuing children from the camps and found her daughters a way out.

“That’s the last time I saw my mother,” she said. “She made us get on the bus, and I could see her waving goodbye as I’m screaming to please let me stay with her.”

Steinfeld and her sister were given fake Catholic identities and survived the war in hiding. When the war ended, they moved to the U.S. to live with a grandfather. They were given a choice of three cities to live in.

“My sister wanted to see cowboys,” Steinfeld said. “So we moved to Houston, Texas.”

Steinfeld didn’t find out what happened to her parents until 1981.

“At that time I found that they had been taken to Auschwitz,” she said. “All that time, I waited for them to come home.”

‘We’ve got to have a better world to live in’

Like many survivors, Steinfeld, Orlin and Zerner have all made a point to tell their stories publicly. Their testimony has also been recorded at Holocaust museums in Texas.

Hy Penn, the child and grandchild of survivors, volunteers at Holocaust Museum Houston. He is involved in making sure survivors’ stories continue to be told.

“In the early days, about 1,000 Holocaust survivors settled in the Houston area. And today we probably have just over 80 that are still with us, and few of those are able to speak,” he said. “So we’re trying to get the next generations, the children of grandchildren and even great grandchildren to start speaking and telling their families’ stories.”

Bill Orlin greets longtime friend and fellow Holocaust survivor Ruth Steinfeld at Holocaust Museum Houston.
Photo by Annie Mulligan

Houston and Dallas have the largest concentration of survivors in Texas. Currently there are about 245,000 survivors living worldwide, with 16% of those in the U.S.

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Penn said he feels drawn to help share survivors’ stories because through the darkness and the horror, he hopes people will see a path forward to a better, more compassionate world.

“We’ve got to have a better world to live in,” he said. “And I think that’s one of the themes here at Holocaust Museum is that we’ve got to teach people to be kind to each other, and we’ve got to treat people with dignity and with respect.”

Steinfeld said she feels compelled to share her story and impart this lesson on behalf of those who are not able to speak for themselves.

“When I went to Israel in 1981, I saw at that time it was just a big plaque with its own eternal light,” she said. “And it said, ‘children: 1,500,000.’ And I made a pledge at that point – I had never talked about my past until then – that from now on, I have to talk for that 1,500,000 who never had a chance.”

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