I would like to present, as exhibit # 1 for this thread - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book - The Gulag Archipelago. If you haven't read this book yet, you don't know the holohoax. It will give you answers for things that you didn't even know there were questions about.
And for exhibit # 2, I give you:
Surviving the Camps but Struggling in Brooklyn
New York Times, January 21, 2010
By JENNIFER MASCIA
Ruth Usherenko keeps an improbably thick book on a table beside the couch in her living room. In it are roughly 58,000 names, all belonging to Jewish Berliners who perished during Hitler's regime. "All my girlfriends, all my relatives, all my neighbors are in here,"
...Beside her sat her sister, Toni Usherenko, 85, equally diminutive and delicate, who spoke in the same halting hybrid of Russian and English. The two live a block apart in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, maintaining a closeness forged during World War II and later in a Siberian prison camp...
The sisters spent their early years in Neustrelitz, a town in northern Germany. After their father, a tailor, became a target of Nazi intimidation, the family moved to Berlin...
The girls' father was badly beaten in the riot, suffering a heart attack and a damaged kidney. Three years later, he was taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he perished.
Weeks after their father was apprehended, Ruth, Toni and their mother were taken to Gross-Rosen , a work camp...
In 1945, the three women were sent by the Soviets to a labor camp in Siberia; they were considered suspect because of their religion and their German provenance.
"We couldn't speak one word of Russian," Ruth Usherenko recalled. "They didn't feed us. When people died, they didn't bury them — they put them in the forest and the wolves were eating them."
So complete was their isolation that they did not know when the war ended. "Stalin passed away in 1953, and they released us in 1955," Ruth Usherenko recalled. "A woman came to us and said, `The war is over.' "
The three women settled in the Ukrainian town of Dnepropetrovsk, where they worked as milliners. The sisters married — Ruth to a shoemaker and Toni to an aviation engineer — and in 1981, after years of trying to leave the Soviet Union, the families were able to emigrate to Brooklyn...
But having money for heat is most important to Ms. Usherenko, perhaps because the cold is a reminder of the frigid decade she spent in Siberia. "They put us in a cold school, no steam," she recounted. "We had one blanket for me, my mother and my sister. Everybody died."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/nyreg ... mps&st=cse
