On May 7, 1943, 12 years old Jewish boy Horst Cohn and his parents were brought into the hall of the
school situated on the outskirts of Berlin. Benches, chairs and tables were removed and
there was nothing but the floor. To humiliate the poor Jews as much as possible, the Nazis
removed all the restroom doors so that everyone in the hall saw others going to the rest room.
They even took away the toilet paper under the pretense that the Jews wouldn't need it..
After all this humiliation, the poor Jews were deported but not put in cattle cars as it was
happening in other parts of Europe, but on a passenger train instead so that people in Berlin
wouldn’t see how badly the Jews were treated. The destination of the train was THERESIENSTADT –
the evil Nazi concentration camp & ghetto in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
Horst and his parents arrived in Theresienstadt on Horst’s 12th birthday. The first sentence they
heard was “anyone who has valuables and doesn’t hand them over will be punished”. A punishment
meant death and to humiliate them even more, all of them – men, women, children and elderly
people - were asked to strip down naked. Men, women, and children were then separated, and they
recognized the true bestiality of the Nazi regime soon after. Because Horst was younger than 13,
he was placed next to other children with whom he shared 3 pets - fleas, lice and bedbugs.
200 inmates were dying every day in the camp of hunger and diseases.
The prisoners slept in overcrowded triple decker wooden bunk beds and when somebody died during the
night, they threw him down. In the morning, all dead corpses were collected. This is what Horst
did first morning in the camp, too – he collected the corpses around the camp on the hand-cart.
The same hand - carts they used to collect bread and distribute it among the camp’s inmates.
The food ration was a quarter of a loaf of bread for 3 days which was one slice of bread per day.
They usually ate it the first day because they could not hide it from
other starving prisoners who would eat it. In the barracks there were only latrines for 100
people, no rest rooms. However, the latrines were not always open and when they were closed, the
inmates who often had diarrhea soiled their pants. The humiliation and suffering knew no limits here.
After a few days, Horst managed to find his father who ended up becoming the camp commandant’s tailor
as well as his mother who worked in ammunitions factory which was essential for war effort.
Thanks to this, they were not deported to extermination camps like Auschwitz.
Theresienstadt did not contain gas chambers, but it did contain crematorium.
Crematorium was built because after the first 10 000 people died, there was no place to bury
the others. To burn corpses in the furnace with a temperature of 2,500 degrees took from 10 to
17 minutes and all that remained was ash. When Horst learned that his grandparents
were in the camp, too, they were at death’s door. He managed to meet them
but they died the same day soon after. Later, Horst was lucky enough to locate their ashes in
the ash boxes with their names on them and poured their remains into the river with his own hands.
One day the order came from the SS about transport to Switzerland and prisoners were asked to
volunteer. The inmates did not believe it was a train to Switzerland because they already knew
the Nazi’s tricks and heard rumors about what was happening in other camps such as Auschwitz.
Thus, the prisoners were hesitant as they did not want to die in gas chambers. In the end,
1,200 Jews including Horst and his parents volunteered and boarded the train dressed in
their nicest clothes. The direction - Switzerland. While they were traveling through Germany,
they saw the country in ruins and soldiers with amputated legs and arms in the Waffen SS trains.
As they entered the border, something hit Horst’s head. Horst though that in the end
the Nazis were going to kill them all. However, he soon realized that it was a Swiss chocolate.
His father told him to eat only one cube, not more. After years of starvation,
their stomachs shrank to nothing, and they could only eat a tiny bit at a time. Those who ate more,
died. A third of 1,200 holocaust survivors died within a month of a burst stomach.
In Switzerland people asked Horst – “how was it?”
In February 1945, 3 months before the end of the war, nobody believed him when he
told the truth about what was going on in the Nazi occupied territories.
The transport which brought Horst and his family to Switzerland was the first and the
last one. Despite Hitler’s order to exterminate all the remaining Jews in concentration camps,
Heinrich Himmler saw the end of the war approaching and wanted to save his own skin.
Himmler negotiated this transport as a secret agreement with Swiss authorities in exchange for
five million Swiss francs worth of medicine and relief supplies for Germany. 500,000 Jews were
to be deported this way. However, when Adolf Hitler got to know about it, he immediately
cancelled this activity and condemned his former faithful henchman for betrayal.
Horst and his family were allowed to stay in Switzerland for only 6 months.
In August 1945, 5 months after their arrival, Horst and his parents boarded the British warship
and sailed to Palestine. In Palestine, Horst Cohn changed his name and became Zvi Cohen.
His parents were blessed with a new son named Abi.
Abi’s birth was the greatest triump over the Nazis – not only he and his parents
survived the Holocaust but a new free Jewish generation was born in the free land of Israel.
Since September 1945, Zvi Cohen has been living in Kibbutz Ma’ Abarot in Isreal.
He got married, had 4 children and 6 grandchildren and 3 great grand children.
This story is dedicated to our dear friend Zvi Cohen.
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