Photo by Eric Taunton.
Riva Hirsch speaks to guests at the North Shelby Library on March 13 about how she survived capture and concentration camps in Ukraine.
She was only 7 years old. Riva Hirsch, a concentration camp survivor captured in 1941 by Nazis, spoke about her road to survival at an event hosted by the Friendship Force of Birmingham at the North Shelby Library on March 13.
It was 1941 in Novaseletz, Romania, when Hirsch’s family was warned by friends that Nazis were coming to their village, she said.
She lived with her mother, father, two brothers and grandmother. Her father owned a business behind their home, and he had several non-Jewish workers who were “like family to them,” coming to holiday dinners every year, she said.
“My grandmother, my mother and my father had a discussion, ‘How can we tell the kids what’s going to happen?’” Hirsch said. “It didn’t take too long. Another gentleman came running (again I can’t recall his name), and he knocked on the door … The sky was already black; you could hear the planes going over our roof. My brother understood then that something really bad was going to happen.”
Her father had no choice but to tell her and her brothers what was happening, she said. Her grandmother, father and mother walked into the room in which they were playing and told them the family had to leave the house and they couldn’t take any toys, Hirsch said.
They walked through a forest in Europe to go to their grandparents’ home, but they never made it, she said.
Along their journey, they stopped at a non-Jewish friend’s house to see if he would let them stay the night, and he didn’t at first, she said.
They knocked on his door twice, she said. He let them in the second time because her mother offered him all the jewelry she had, Hirsch said. She figured she wouldn’t have any use for them for a long time.
“We just happened to get ready to sit down before he came running back,” Hirsch said. “He said, ‘You have to stand up with the children; you have to leave me. You have to leave the mill because they’re around the corner with their tanks and their motorcycles. If they come in and they find you, they’re going to shoot you and then take care of my family.’”
Aftering leaving the mill, they struggled to find food and shelter, filling up on mice before they were captured, she said.
“The minute we left the forest to the end, almost to the road, they surrounded us with their tanks and their dogs,” she said. “They ripped us apart. They threw my father away to another corner; they threw me to another corner.”
My mother was running, and they started beating her up, almost to death, Hirsch said.
She and her family were separated, forced to march to Sukarein and forced into cattle cars to a concentration camp in Mogilev, which is on the border between the Soviet Republic of Ukraine and the Romanian province of Bessarabia.
She was reunited with her family in Israel in 1948 after spending two years in a refugee camp in Cypress, she said. She met her husband, Isaac Hirsch, in Israel and got married in 1950.
