I was violently ill when I spoke about the horror I’d seen 50 years before

Source: Metro

Author: Rachel Levy

Published: Jan, 27 2025 06:30

‘My name is Rachel Levy…’. As soon as I spoke these words to a table full of other Holocaust survivors at a luncheon in the 1980s, I immediately came over very ill and began intensely shaking. Everyone was telling their stories of survival, but then it was my turn and I just froze.

Image Credit: Metro [Rachel Levy: Holocaust survivor]

I ended up being violently sick and was taken out to a first aid tent. Then the hammering in my head started – and it didn’t stop for months. In the half a century since I’d been in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, I had never once told anyone about it in any sort of detail.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but this physical reaction was my body’s way of trying to cope with processing what happened to me all those years ago. I was born in a small mountain village called Bhutz in Czechoslovakia (which is now modern-day Ukraine) on April 30, 1930. As the second eldest of five children in an Orthodox Jewish family, our life was simple and we were happy.

Then the Nazis invaded around 1938 and everything started to change – especially for the 100 or so Jewish families in the village. I was around eight years old, so I didn’t really know what was going on at the time, except that no schools would allow Jewish children.

Then in 1942, the Nazis came to our village and rounded up all the young men. I was at home and I just recall Dad being pulled out and marched off. I don’t know if I was even able to say goodbye. I never saw him again. I’d later learn that he was taken to a forced labour camp, which is where he most likely died.

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I was violently ill when I spoke about the horror I’d seen 50 years before

I was violently ill when I spoke about the horror I’d seen 50 years before

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