Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Anne Hirschle - July 21, 2006

Not Feeling Like a Holocaust Victim

Well, thank you very much Anne. Thank you for your time and story.

Well, thank you, I hope that some of it was a little good to you. I, I don't know, as I said when I contacted you, I don't really feel like a Holocaust victim. I didn't really know whether I belonged in the, in this uh, archive. But I, I just found that one, that one incident that saved my life um, quite interesting maybe for somebody.

Well, I think you're a survivor. You-a different type of survivor, but a survivor nonetheless.

Yeah.

It's-there's a lot of different categories.

Maybe it shaped my thinking more than I, I realize. I think that's quite possible that it has shaped my thinking. I, I know it has certainly shaped my children's thinking and my grandchildren's thinking because they ask me about it. And, and we talk about it and uh, uh, my, my daughter particularly is very involved in, in different endeavors to make the world a better place. So perhaps something as a result of my experiences, even though I was fortunate to escape the real tragedy of it. Oh, there was one thing, you said um, my grandmother, the one who had to leave a son behind, I-the one that I evacuated with. Um, I do remember that she never talked about a son who was left behind and I've often thought about it since, what tremendous restraint she must have exercised uh, around me because she never said, "I wonder where he is." Of course, at that time one didn't know the full extent of the Holocaust yet because it was wartime, so we hadn't really been told the whole thing. But she must have known that they were in peril. And I often wonder about that now, how hard it must have been. And even my father-I don't remember him ever talking about his brother who was left behind, but then again, the real horror of what happened to these people they'd left behind didn't really uh, become that obvious until after the war.


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