“I can only say my memories of Kristallnacht will never leave me,” said Senta Seligmann, survivor, at a Yom Hashoa Holocaust Memorial Service.
The annual event of remembrance, at the Rockwood Park Jewish Center in Howard Beach, was held on Monday evening, April 20.
Seligmann, one of several survivors present, was still emotional seven decades later. She recounted to the rapt audience how, at only 13, she witnessed “[the Nazis] took my father and threw him down the stairs.”
The SS took her mother, too, and then demanded that she go with them as well.
Concerned for her eight-year-old sister and four-year-old brother, Seligmann said they spent one night in “protective custody.”
Her father, she said, spent six weeks in a concentration camp.
But the family of German Jews was able to escape to America in August of 1939.
“We came a week or two before the war started,” said Seligmann. “Thank God we got here in time.”
Other members of her family were not so fortunate, she said. Her paternal grandmother, aunts and uncle all perished in the Holocaust.
Still, for Seligmann, coming to America was a “miracle” – and she still feels the same way 71 years later.
“How do you deal with a life after seeing so many tragedies,” asked Rabbi Tzvi Berkowitz.
Calling the survivors “role models,” Berkowitz urged that “We don’t take life for granted – respect each other’s dignity so this never happens again.”
“It’s up to us to keep the memory alive,” said Queens Supreme Court Justice Augustus C. Agate.
Captain Joseph Courtesis of the 106th Precinct agreed.
“I bring these stories back to my precinct and to my family – I promise on my part that I’ll keep the stories going.”
The evening concluded with the singing of the Holocaust Anthem Song “Zog Nit Keinmal.”
