Showing results by author "Ellen Elizabeth Dudley" in All Categories

This is a tale of survival, a child’s bravery, and a mother’s revenge. In January 1942, concentration camps were constructed by slave labor in Poland. For the deportation of Jewish men women and children to these camps, railway transport was provided by the German national railway system. Rachel Silbermann was deported along with her family from Berlin to Auschwitz-Berkinau. Her mother, however, unlike the rest of her family who perished, escaped and joined the Polish resistance where she learned a new trade and learned it well; she became a sniper, a very successful one.

This tragic tale concerns two Jewish women living in Hamburg in Nazi Germany before WW2, Ellen Kaempfer and Betty Holstein, and a non-Jewish woman, Elfriede Mollenhauer, who tried to help them. Ellen and Betty were to be deported by cattle train, which meant standing room only, a journey that would take days. They were to be taken from Hamburg to a work camp in Poland, a journey without food or drink, with only a bucket for a toilet.