A Survivor Remembers the Holocaust
Written by Esther Lucky, April 25, 2005

When we were young we promised each other
faithfulness and love for eternity.
We married and lived in honesty.
Our happy years could hardly be counted
before one night - overnight,
the enemy came and occupied our land.

There was no time to flee, to hide, or to look for help.
Our Jewish youth were caught first; taken from the street.
The next day, all men had to leave and were forced
to work in the minefields in occupied Russia.
My only brother had, too, to go.
To our great sorrow, he never returned.

Hitler never stopped scolding the Jewish nation, saying:
"The way for them is my Final Solution."
He ordered us out of our homes; the Gestapo
chased us with beatings into the ghettoes.
Soon came the long cattle trains that
took us to a never-heard-of place: Auschwitz.
We were told, "You will go to work with your family,"
but it was not true.

We were cheated and separated from our dear family.
Our parents were led from the train straight to the gas chambers.
My husband was sent to Mauthausen to work in the stone mine.
He came home without being able to see in one eye.
And me: to Riga, Latvia on the Baltic Sea, where
in fourteen brutal camps I worked as a nurse.

I proudly stand for what I showed to God,
how I worked with His help.
We perished, mourned, cried, and kept hoping to return
to tell our stories so that the whole world would know:
"Never forget the genocide that happened."
Now only a few of us are left; we still mourn quietly in our hearts.
Sixty years after the war has ended, the handful of us who remain still
have a mission: to help, to teach and to never forget the Holocaust.
Never.