Holocaust horrors

HARLINGEN — A group of more than 100 11th-grade history students watched as Rose Sherman Williams lifted the sleeve of her red blouse to expose “A15049,” the number that was tattooed on her forearm when she, then a 12-year-old girl, arrived at Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp.

The 82-year-old’s story chronicles her journey through several German labor camps. It begins with the German invasion of her hometown, Radom, Poland, in September 1939.
Williams told her story to a group of high school students gathered Tuesday in Harlingen school district’s board meeting room. Her tale followed a history of Germany leading up to the Holocaust, presented by San Antonio Holocaust Memorial & Museum docent Becky Hoag.

Hoag discussed turmoil in the European country following World War I and its plunge into poverty during the Great Depression. She spoke about the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in 1933 and Hitler’s subsequent rise to become nation’s dictator.
The lecture painted a bleak picture of the Jews as an “easy scapegoat” for Hitler and discussed the indoctrination of German school children to hate the Jews.

Williams, now a San Antonio resident, later talked about watching her grandmother die, shot by a German soldier, for trying to stop soldiers from smashing Jewish children against boulders to kill them.

Her grandmother’s death occurred while soldiers prepared to transport families to labor camps. The soldier struck Williams in the head with his rifle butt when she tried to defend her grandmother, a wound from which there remains a bald spot on her scalp.
“Life in the ghetto was too hard even to describe to you,” she said.Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust were walled-off sections of cities, used to concentrate Jews and keep them from escaping. The ghettos were places of extreme poverty and famine as the people relied only on supplies and food provided by the Nazies.

Williams said she likely never ate more than 400 calories on any single day in the ghetto.
“I can’t even begin to describe to you the starvation and sickness in the ghettos,” she said.

She described marches between camps wearing wooden shoes, which she threw away, exchanging them for paper and rags. She said her feet became ulcerated and nearly froze. At one point she described asking a soldier to send her into the gas chamber for execution, the result of a complete loss of hope.

She was forced to move rocks from one place to another at Auschwitz, a task for which there was no purpose. She remembered standing in the freezing cold, in rows and lines as Nazi soldiers took roll over and over again.
“We all had to be accounted for,” she said.

The story ends when Williams is liberated from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She eventually found her sister who had been in Auschwitz during the same time and the two lived together in New York. Williams says she is the only living member of her immediate family.

High school students listening to Williams’ story were in tears, and punctuated the tragic account with a standing ovation from every student watching in the school district’s boardroom.
Joel Montemayor, 17, said he had never heard anything so captivating.
“It was very emotional the way she described it. I don’t think people can actually go through that and actually survive,” he said. “It’s pretty amazing.”