Holocaust survivor Aisic Hirsch answers questions from students at Duran North Junior High in Pell City last week while his wife Riva looks on.

By Michael Mee

mmee@newsaegis.com

For the past several weeks students at Duran North Junior High have been studying the Holocaust.

The cross-curriculum studies included creating symmetrical butterflies in math classes. The art pieces will be sent to a Holocaust museum in Texas as part of a nationwide effort to collect 1.5 million representations of those who went through the events in Europe during World War II.

The culmination of the Pell City students’ studies ended last week as two survivors shared the story of their childhoods spent during the holocaust.

Aisic Hirsch

In 1939, when Aisic was nine, the war came to his hometown of Mogielnica, Poland, population 60,000.

He remembers the day was soggy. Aisic and other boys in the city lined up on the streets to greet to incoming German soldiers. “To me there wasn’t a difference between a Polish soldier and a German soldier. We didn’t know yet was what to happen later. But we found out.”

Four hours after the ‘welcome,’ Aisic saw a huge fire coming out down the road, maybe a mile away. Everyone, he said, was running toward the fire. The Germans had set the two synagogues in town on fire.

“This was just to tell the Jewish people in the city — to humiliate the Jewish.”

From that point on, the Jewish children in town were not allowed to go to school. A few weeks later both rabbis in town and 20 to 30 or their followers were taken to the market. Their beards were cut off and they were executed by gunfire and hung in the middle of the market.

“I was just a little boy running around in the market and went home and told my mother ‘These people are murderers! They’ve killed these people!’”

The Jewish people in town were moved into a ghetto where 10 families would live in a home built for one.

The only time the Jewish were allowed out of the ghetto was for food. If they were caught after curfew, they were executed.

After nearly seven months, those in the ghetto were put on trucks and then cattle trains, packed 100 people in a space that would normally hold 30 or 40.

Aisic, his mother, grandmother and little brother ended up in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto. His father had died the year before the Germans entered Poland. “The Warsaw Ghetto — it can compare almost to a concentration camp,” Aisic told the students.

Once a day the people were fed a little soup and a piece of bread. “I mean, it was horrible to a kid like me. Nine, maybe ten already… So, we did the best we could. We wanted to survive. But it was hard to survive”

Aisic’s brother died of high fever soon after and his grandmother also got sick and died there. “It was bad. Bad.”

His mother sat him down one night and told him she had heard of an organization called Save the Children, which would take him away from the ghetto. His mother told him “Maybe with God’s help, you save yourself and one of the family is going to be saved.”

He told her he wouldn’t leave her, but after talking to him about it several times a day he agreed. He estimates nearly 50 kids were taken from the ghetto. The German guards were paid to turn the other way.

Just outside, Polish citizens were waiting to catch the children and return them for a reward of a liter of vodka. “I was faster than them. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

He walked 50 miles back to Mogielnica, sleeping in open fields during the day to avoid being caught.  He ended up at the home of one of his father’s friends. After staying in the shed in the man’s yard, he was asked to leave. The man feared for his own family’s safety for putting up Aisic.

Aisic ended up in a Jewish cemetery, living in what he described as a shallow cave, where he built a makeshift roof. The man’s son brought him bread at his father’s orders for three weeks until one day he brought German soldiers who shot repeatedly into the hole until they were satisfied that whoever was in there was dead.

Aisic watched this from high up in a tree, having climbed there when he heard the soldiers’ voices approaching.

He ended up at another of his father’s friends’ homes, where he waited out an illness. There he was given a book of Catholic prayers. The man told him to memorize the prayers because it might be important to him later.

When that man asked him to leave out of fear for his family, Aisic ended up in a small village on a Sunday. He entered the church. The people knew he wasn’t from there.

“I looked like a Polish boy — I’m blond haired, blue eyed… but this might mean nothing.” At confession time, he went into the booth. He started crying.

The priest told him words he remembers to this day. “He said, ‘Listen, the war is not gonna be forever. It’s going to end. You are going to find — someday — your loved ones and you’ll be with them again.”

The priest made him a fake birth certificate and gave him a back-story to use from that point on. “I figure the priest really wanted to help me survive; and he really was my guardian angel.”

He sent him to a village where the elder would help him. Aisic, 14 years old by now, lived on and tended to a farm in the village for the remainder of the war. One day the widowed woman who owned the farm and her two half-Dutch, half-German sons fled as Russian troops approached.

The Russian troops set up their headquarters on the farm. Believing Aisic to be a German sympathizer, the soldiers regularly beat him until one day he proved to the captain that he was Jewish. The captain was Jewish, as well.

Aisic returned to Mogielnica. Citizens told him and the 17 other Jewish returnees to leave by firing bullets into the windows one night and leaving a note on the door.

He ended up in Israel where he met his wife, Riva. The couple came to America and raised two children. They live in Irondale today.

Aisic said an uncle told him his mother died in a hospital in captivity. He said he thinks his mother went to her grave knowing she saved her son from death.

Riva’s story

“We’re two people that survived that misery,” Riva told the students last week. “It’s really hard for us to come back to attest to tell you about it.”

In 1941, when she was seven, the war came to her town, between Romania and Russia.

Her father, a farmer, answered the door one night. “I want you to be prepared because something bad is going to happen here,” Riva heard a neighbor telling him.

Her father informed Riva’s mother and grandmother the news. Ten minutes later another man came by to share the same news.

“You could smell the [burning] human hair [outside],” she recalled.

Her mother gave each child a small bit of food and the family soon found themselves in the mill of a neighbor, her mother having given up all of her jewlry for one night’s stay in safety.

After an hour, the owner came and asked them to leave, the Germans were around the corner, he told them.

Just as her future husband had experienced two years prior, she and her family were put on a train.

On the way to their destination, Riva said she saw children being thrown from the train. When the train stopped, she was picked up by her legs and thrown into barbed wires. “That was a holocaust. That was a misery. I had to step on dead bodies, on dead little children.”

She was separated from her family and the people were told to cross a river on a makeshift ferry. Every few groups were let loose through a trap door into the river.

She ended up in a camp. She got sick with malaria and typhus. She lost all her teeth.

She got sick again and lost the ability to walk.

One night a man took her and hid her in hay in a wagon and took her from the camp. “I was more dead than alive and I didn’t care if I died.”

She was taken to a convent where she waited out the last two years of the war hidden in a small area in barn, still unable to walk.

One day a nun came and told her that she was liberated. She crawled to the sidewalk where a man picked her up and took her to the Red Cross station set up in a nearby town. Her father, on crutches and wearing a filthy beard, found her there.

“I want you all to know that,” she told the students at last week. “I wish I could say it’s not true. It’s a true story.”