My Number is A91432

By Douglas Graves © 2009

“The Germans came into our house while we were eating dinner,” said the trim, elderly lady. “They threw our food on the floor—and they kicked us out of our house with what we were wearing. We ended up in some form of a big place—people walking about—with Germans quietly killing people.”
Her name was Lieberman then but seventy years later 83-year old Yolanda Hamer was telling her story to her children in Bethlehem—a story about losing her parents and her brothers to the Holocaust. She had written a short story for her children--one of savagery relating how a young Jewish girl was ripped from her loving family in Roztoky, Czechoslovakia and sent on a terrible journey.
“We started hearing news from Germany about the Nuremberg laws [that] were coming into effect. We felt very secure, [that] this [would] not happen to us. We went to school, spoke about Hitler in class and [tried] to make sense of it all. ‘The Nuremberg laws will never reach us’ was our answer. He left us alone for two years.”
“We were expelled from school [and] were not allowed in public places,” she said. “Our new I D was a yellow star with black letters: Juole or Jew.
“One day we heard a rumor [that we would] be deported. Shortly we were instructed to pack a small bag; little food and nothing else. They pushed us into trucks and brought us into a brick factory which they converted into a ghetto.” There single families were crammed into squalid ten-foot by ten-foot cubicles with no water nor toilets. “Within a week we were infested with body [lice] and head lice. This was the first lesson of Hell on earth.”
“One morning we got up and saw trucks lined up. They loaded the trucks and off we went to the train station. We were pushed into cattle cars, 120 per car. The two little windows were about one foot long. We couldn’t count on fresh air. We were given a bucket for a toilet—no food or water. Soon people started fainting from the heat and thirst.”
Yolanda said she thought it was in May. “We were heading east. We spent four days traveling. Half the people were dead. The stench was horrible. It was a big, big train.”
“After a few days . . . we reached [Auschwitz],” she wrote in her story for her children. [We were] greeted by Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. He made his selection. My sister [Jean] and I . . . remained together. My mother and two brothers went by ambulance to the gas chambers. My father was sent to a work line. That was the last time I saw them.
“They took our clothes and shaved all of our hair. Next came a permanent mark on [our arms]. My number is A91432,” said Yolanda showing the bluish, faded tattoo. “I think the nine stands for 1939.”
“I asked one of the men . . . ‘How do we get out of here?’ His answer was very simple. ‘You see the chimney? That’s your exit.’ I had no idea what he was talking about.”
“We spent endless hours just standing while we were being counted. Every morning when we came out the barbed wire [fence] was laced with bodies. They served as examples in case we decided to escape.”
“A slice of bread [and] a cup of water (they called it soup) sustained us for a day. We cleaned the streets—picked up garbage. [We were] supervised by SS [guards] and German Shepherds [dogs]. If there was no work, we stood in line. If they didn’t like the way you stood, there was no food for the next two days. [It was] another way of eliminating a body from the roster. We hoped for a miracle but none came.”
After about six months at Auschwitz the two girls were sent to Plaszow, a concentration camp near Krakow, Poland. The place was known as a slave labor camp that provided slave workers to several nearby armament factories. The death rate at Plaszow was very high.
“There we worked like true slaves: loading bricks on trucks, unloading coal, and shoveling coal down a shaft. From there we moved to unloading trains [coming] from the Russian front. [The trains were packed with] uniforms which were full of blood, body parts and, primarily, lice—we had enough of our own.”
“A bright side [for us] were the 200 children in the camp. They gave us hope for a new world. But one night we heard screams from the parents of the children and [we heard] children crying ‘Don’t take us away from our parents!’ They were taken to Auschwitz, their final trip.”
“Shortly afterwards we were shipped back to Auschwitz. We didn’t work, just stood in line, rain or shine. Our bodies were full of sores from the lice. We tried to hide it, otherwise we would be gassed. We slept in bunks—four to a bunk with one blanket. I don’t know how we survived on the ration of food. If you moved from your spot in line, you were the dogs’ next meal. If you had an itch you’d better not scratch.”
“The worst night was Kol-Nidre night [the first evening of Yom Kippur]. They brought a transport of Hungarian Jews. Among them were quite a few rabbis. They put the loud-speaker near the gas chamber to make sure we heard their cries and prayers calling to the Almighty while they were being pushed [into the gas chambers].
“Later they walked us [to a place] to watch the shooting of prisoners. After they shot them they threw them into ditches where the fire was ready for them.”
A few days later Yolanda and Jean were shipped out to Oberalstadt [Czechoslovakia]. On the way their train was attacked by Allied aircraft. “They must have known what the cargo was [as] they hit only the locomotive. The doors opened. We started jumping out—right into the SS’ hands. I [fell] on my knee, severely injuring it. We tried to get back on the train [but] they started beating us with their clubs. We were rounded up, re-counted and [forced] to walk to our barracks. I don’t ever remember being so hungry . . .”
Yolanda and her sister while at Oberalstadt worked in a yarn factory owned by Siemens [then, and now, a major manufacturer of electrical components]. “Our shift was 16 hours a day [with] one meal and very little sleep.” Yolanda now had a straw-filled pillow to go with their one blanket and four-to-a-person bed.
Some sources put the number of Jewish women working for Siemens as virtual slaves in 1941 at approximately 900.
Her knee, injured during the attack on the train and now and infected and gangrenous, didn’t stop the Germans from forcing her to dig ditches while watched by the SS and their growling dogs. “At this point I was praying and hoping I would die soon. The pain was unbearable. I was unable to work any longer. They took me to an infirmary [with] no medicine, not even an aspirin.”
“In spite of not having even anesthetic, a captured Russian woman doctor decided to operate. She was the angel who saved my life.”
Yolanda was transferred to a typhoid ward to recover. “I was positive I’d never walk out of there. The patients were delirious with fever. They screamed and . . . were praying for an end. Every few hours the orderly came in and pulled out a body or two. Those screams and cries! I still hear them sometimes at night.”
But they made it. “We started hearing rumors [that] the war was ending. Sure enough, one morning when we came out to go to work—no more SS! American and British soldiers greeted us. ‘You are free,’ they said.”
But, according to Yolanda, the next day the Americans and British left. Their zone belonged to Russians according to agreements made at Yalta. “Later that day the Russians rolled in. They saw girls and they were ready to party.” Yolanda’s expression as she tells the story reveals that “party” was a euphemism to describe much worse intentions. “We jumped out of windows and ran into the woods.”
After running into what she described as a regiment of Nazis, they came back to the barracks. But soon they were able to return to their childhood home in Roztoky.
According to Robert B. Pynsent of the University College at London’s School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, “Jews returning [to Czechoslovakia] from concentration camps were often faced with being treated as Germans.”
“There was a priest living in [our] house. He was rude to us telling us point-blank [to] ‘beat it’. [This] was my first mis-giving about surviving.”
The sisters went to Prague where they read in a Jewish newspaper that an aunt and uncle in the United States were advertising for Lieberman family survivors. Abraham and Margaret Howe, living in The Bronx, agreed to sponsor both Yolanda and Jean. They got permission to travel to the United States but, “It took four years of waiting . . . under constant scrutiny [by the Communists] because they knew we were leaving they country.”
Yolanda made it to Canada and then to New York. There, on a blind date, she met her husband, Barry, at a dance. They married in 1952 and made their home, first in Brooklyn and then in Queens, raising two children, Sharon and Joseph. Yolanda and Barry now make their home with Sharon. They attend the Brith Sholom Congregation in Bethlehem.
“When I look back [on my life]--the hunger, the beatings, the lice and the abuse were worthwhile. When somebody says ‘the Holocaust is a Jewish myth’ I am here to tell them I was there! It really happened!