Holocaust survivor talks of the preciousness of life

Alla Czerkasij spent three years in hunger and fear at a labor camp in Leipzig, Germany, during World War II, she told students gathered at the Whitfield Career Academy recently — but says she doesn’t hate anyone.

“Humans are humans wherever they are,” she said. “I don’t hate anybody. I love everybody because God loves us.”

Czerkasij, a 74-year-old native of Ukraine who immigrated to the United States following the war and currently lives in Collegedale, Tenn., speaks to groups of students and at area church functions about her experience as a survivor of the Holocaust.

As a little girl, she attended her grandmother’s Greek Orthodox church. By age 7, she was on a train with her family en route to live with her parents in a labor camp. During the journey, four young teens decided to get off the train, their attempts at running answered by shots from German guards, Czerkasij said, her voice trembling at the memory.

“Life is so precious,” she said.

The Germans made some attempt at calming their nerves.

“They said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll give you jobs,’” she recalled. “‘We’ll give you a place to stay,’ like they were calming us down. And they were true to their words — and now I am being sarcastic.”

The laborers at the Leipzig camp slept in crowded rooms, their facility surrounded with shiny new barbed wire fences and with armed guards and shepherd dogs. A man called Nero drove fear into the prisoners there with his reputation for beating anyone who got slightly out of line, she said.

Food was scarce, and they began losing weight. In desperation, Czerkasij’s father and another man decided one night to try to break out of their quarters and steal food for themselves and their families. They were caught and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. They later learned her father had died there at the hands of a guard.

One night, they heard sirens blaring. Usually, they didn’t run for the bomb shelter until the third call, but Czerkasij’s mother this time ordered her to go. As they fled, they could see the bombs lighting up the sky and heard a tremendous explosion. Turning around, they saw a bomb fly into the corner of the house they had just left.

Together, they went down in a cellar, hoping for safety, but the room was packed and smoke began to seep in, making it difficult to breathe.

Many people began losing hope and crying softly. Others cursed the Germans, angry at their bitter plight. One 16-year-old girl cried out, “Mother, why did you give birth to me? I didn’t ask you to be born in this world!”

“‘Be quiet!’” a man ordered her, according to Czerkasij, only in harsher language. “‘You’ll scare the little one!’” referring to her.

The girl was 16 and she was 8, but there seemed to be little difference, she said. To her right, Czerkasij watched a group of Russians gathered in a circle, kneeling, and a man praying in the middle. He prayed in Russian, “Oh, God, save us! Help us, God!” she said.

They wanted to run, but at the exit a young Nazi guard with a gun warned he would shoot if anyone moved. They were trapped inside the smoky cellar as their camp burned around them. Then something else happened.

“It was as if another power lifted us to our feet, and in unison we darted toward the exit,” Czerkasij said. “We knocked the guard down. We knocked out his gun — he didn’t have time to pull the trigger — stepped over him, and we ran out.”

Debris was falling all around them and their clothes were burning, she said. Terrified, they ran toward the labor camp gate and in their fear and desperation knocked it down and were able to flee to safety from the fire.

Czerkasij said she thought to herself then, “How is it that those people prayed and they expected this God that lives in my Grandma’s village in this church — they expected him to hear? That’s fantastic! I couldn’t understand it, and yet I was full of pride.”

She thought again, “When I grow up, I’ll find out who this God is.”

From there, the Germans placed them in a partly abandoned factory where they continued to be forced laborers. Hunger continued to grip them, but some of the more fortunate German people there began to share part of their food with the children. Just before the Americans came to liberate them, she and dozens of other people were lying in a hole in the ground as they tried to escape the surrounding fighting and shots firing overhead.

They stayed there until the sounds passed and they began to hear birds tweeting. When they looked out they saw a field covered with dead bodies but in the distance on a hill saw the Americans coming, she said.

Czerkasij’s mother and she survived the war, and her mother married a Ukrainian. Czerkasij met a Ukrainian man and married him and the two immigrated to New York, then moved to Tennessee. A Seventh-Day Adventist introduced them to the church there, and Czerkasij has since told her story in several churches.

She said she never complains about food and is very thankful for her life in the United States.

Career Academy teacher Lisa Barber’s ninth-grade class has been reading “Night,” a work by Elie Wiesel based upon experiences at a Nazi concentration camp. She said her class was assigned to write reflections on Czerkasij’s story, comparing and contrasting it with “Night.”

Freshman Brittany Maynor said her class has been studying the Holocaust, but it’s a subject that has interested her for a long time.

“I would love to hear a lot of these stories,” she said. “That’s kind of my dream — to make a book of all of their stories.”

Freshman Jonathon Carter said he found it interesting that Czerkasij was so young when she had such traumatic experiences.

“I’ve never talked to a survivor (of the Holocaust),” he said. “... She was really young, but even though she’s been through a lot of hard times, she doesn’t really hate anybody.”

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