Ruth was born Renee Friedman in a Czechoslovaca Jewish family that included doctors and rabbis. The Friedmans, he said, also had a wholesale liquor business and directed a support dining room for those in need.
As World War II enraged in the Open, Nazi Germany secretly applied to killing all European Jews, and the genocide of the third Reich finally reached the Friedmans.
They lost their business, then their home. And in May 1944 they were torn from each other, some forever.
The mother of Cohen, Bertha, her little brother, Ari, and her etese cousins, 9 years old, and read, 11, were killed together with Cohen’s grandmother and more dozens of family members.
Cohen says that his family had adopted the cousins having “to save Slovakia, because it was important only for my parents, and then came with us and were killed before their parents were killed.”
Cohen did not remain captive at Auschwitz and part of the extermination complex where his tour began on Tuesday. But she believes her father spent time there. She saw it through a fence once in the nearby Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, where she was imprisoned just over a mile away.
“I know I was carrying blankets … I guess the crematorium or somewhere, and that was in July.”
The Nazis tried to cover up their crimes, stealing survivors as cohen of the details of the last hours of loved ones.
“There are many things that I fainted completely,” Cohen said. But walking through Auschwitz for the first time since his release of May 1945 from another Nazi concentration camp, he vividly described other memories.
Cohen spent most of the tour of approximately six hours walking, first avoiding a wheelchair and then an isolated golf cart. Often, she walked without any help. There was only one place that I specifically asked to see: Sector 2, Section C, Block 30.
“Six of us sleep in this way. Six of us sleep that way. So there were 12 in a small area, ”said Cohen while standing in the ruins of his old barracks, where he is still standing a brick fireplace. The field was full of chimneys.
She said the bunk beds were only wooden planks; The other 11 women in their area shared a space without barriers between them. Cohen’s older sister, Teresa, slept with her every night.
“I’m sure, I’m sure, he saved my life,” he said.
She asked her daughter, Barbara Cohen, to take a picture on the site: a 94 -year -old holocaust surviv Killed, approximately 90% that they were Jews, like Cohen’s family.
“I’m fine. I’m here and I’m here and I’m here. And Hitler lost,” he said.
Finally, Cohen, his sister and his father were transferred to other fields of concentration, released and gathered. They built a new life in the United States without so many loved ones.
Promising that stopping the story is repeated, Cohen, who now lives in northern Bethesda, Maryland, is a volunteer in the “Survivors Desk” of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, sharing its history with visitors. But the world feels different from her today, with an anti -Semitism arising.
“Anti -Semitism is changing. Racism is changing. Racism in all forms, as well as anti -Semitism, and is scary, and that is what has to be fought, “he warned, and then added:” The world seems to be getting worse instead of better. No one, nobody remembers what happened. “
Then, Ruth Cohen decided that he needed to return to the place that he took so many of his family and innumerable others.
“I have to witness the world I went through, the horrors. I survived. I made a life. I have children, wonderful children, who will not carry my legacy, but my story, ”said Cohen.
That story made Barbara Cohen cry on Tuesday when she found her grandmother Bertha in the name book of the exhibition.
“It’s so real. I mean, my grandmother is part of me. I have his name and I can look at the buildings and I can look around and see the horrors that everyone lived, but when he saw his name, it is her, ”he said.
After hours of tours, giving testimony and praying for those who perished, Ruth Cohen offered us advice to avoid future genocide and dehumanization of any group of people.
“I could say it in a word: love. … love will never allow something like that to happen, “he said.” Hate could. “
