Local author Sandra Scheller will hold a presentation for her book “Try to Remember — Never Forget” on Thursday, April 26, from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Civic Center Library, 365 F Street, Chula Vista.
The book details the memoirs of her mother Ruth Goldschmeldova Sax, a Holocaust survivor. Sax now lives in Paradise Village in National City. The book is subtitled “From Holocaust Hell to Paradise Village.”
It is a story of survival amidst the most unbelievable evil.
Sax’s family lived in Brno, Czechoslovakia, at the time of the Nazi occupation of that country in 1939. She was 10 years old when swastika banners — and men with swastika armbands began appearing in her neighborhood.
Up to that time, the young girl had thought the Nazis were a remote threat to her homeland as Europe was still at peace.
But that quickly changed. Once Czechoslovakia fell under Hitler’s control, Jewish children could no longer attend public schools with non-Jews but had to attend Jewish schools. Those Jewish schools were then closed, leaving children disenfranchised from mainstream society.
Her family was eventually deported to Auschwitz, from which her father escaped and she and her mother faced the infamous Dr. Joseph Mengele six times during his iterrifyiong inspections of prisoners.
Sax, 88, can still recall the terrible times at Auschwitz — how prisoners were counted numerous times, watching how people were separated into two lines, one line of which was never to be seen again.
She can still see the smoke rising from the gas chamber crematoriums — and note the smell that issued from them.
By a miracle, their time in the notorious Nazi death camp was short. They were sent to Oederan, Saxony, in the German Reich, where a subcamp of the Flössenburg concentration camp was located, to work in armaments production as slave laborers.
They remained there until the Russian advance in April 1945 upon which they were evacuated. Liberation shortly followed as the Nazi regime collapsed in flames.
While the past cannot be changed, those in the present can help heal wounds — and educate a new generation of children with tales from their own robbed childhood. Sax remembers those distant times that many today only see at arm’s length in history books.
History has a knack of repeating itself: evil is never completely stamped out but simply changes its face.
The author may be contacted by email at sscheller@cox.net.
