International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The collection of UKEN’s Centre for the Documentation of Displacement, Expulsion and Resettlement contains many harrowing stories of Holocaust survivors, who often lost entire families during the war.
Among the interviews, recorded in both Poland and Israel, is one recorded in 2015 with Ms Dina Langbaum.
She was born in Warsaw in 1932. During the Second World War, among other things, she lived in the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942, she escaped a transport from Minsk Mazowiecki to the German Nazi extermination camp in Treblinka, where her grandparents most likely perished. She was hidden in Warsaw, Kutno and Łódź. In 1946, she arrived in Palestine. She lost almost her entire family in the Holocaust.
This is how she recalled the tragic events of 1942:

‘It was a terrible day. A granddaughter came to see us. It was the daughter of the grandmother’s son. She was so pretty. I think she was much older than me, maybe a few years.She was a redhead, so pretty.[…] The Germans started shooting.They killed her.She got a bullet here [in the chest].It was terrible.
Many years later, when I came to Israel, I more or less forgot everything, or wanted to forget, I don’t know… But I remembered [realised] how my grandmother felt when they killed her granddaughter. She fell like that and that hair was so [scattered]. This red hair, so curly… I was looking at her like this. ‘My God…’. And my grandmother took me so I couldn’t see her. Many years later I couldn’t imagine how my grandmother felt… It was terrible. It was at Umschlagplatz [in Minsk Mazowiecki], before the march to the train.
And then, before the evening… There were a lot of rabbis there, in that Minsk Mazowiecki. There was a neighbourhood.There were a lot of devout Jews.They stood up… Because they were all sitting in the market.But they wanted to pray, so they stood up.The Germans started shooting.They killed them, I don’t know how many, but full.And then the Germans started shouting:‘Get up.’And we started to walk.People got up, we started walking.We entered such a very narrow street… It’s hard for me… It was called Siennicka, because there were a lot of haylofts made there.I was walking with my grandmother, she was holding me like this… This granddaughter stayed on this Umschlagplatz… We crossed some fence and there was a small gate.It was my grandmother who grabbed me by the back and pushed me into that gate and shouted after me:‘Run away!’.[…] I was still looking at her like that – ‘Why is she pushing me in?What happened?’I didn’t say ‘Shalom’ to her, nothing. I didn’t say goodbye to her.Later, a few years later I understood why that was. After all, it was what saved me, the fact that I ran away…’.