The Commercial Appeal honors
the late Dicky Ehrlich of Memphis who survived the horrors of
nine Nazi concentration camps. She was honored posthumously with
the Women of Achievement heritage award for the many
years she spent speaking before school groups telling her story
so the world would never forget. She survived because she was
befriended by a supervisor in a German plant who gave her food.
She was later reunited with her German friend when she paid for
the immigration or her and her husband to the United States in
1956.
When I woke up two Gestapo men were standing over me and
this time there was no out. We were loaded into trucks and
transported to a gathering place and shipped like cattle in cars
to a camp in Holland...
Ehrlichs parents had both died in the camps. Her mother got
scarlet fever while working in a childrens camp barracks.
Ehrlich once told the story to the Southern Historical
Association: "She dies and is cremated. Cremation. The
distinct smell of burning skin and hair is unlike any other. . .
. I am outside and see smoke coming from the smokestack. It is
windy, downcast. The smoke hits my nostrils. Oh, my God. This is
my mother. The next day a guard tries to sell me her ashes in a
cigar box. I have no money. Where could I possibly keep the
box?" Her father died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz in
Poland...
We learned we could only die once. We learned how to live,
how to survive, how to share, how to get along with so many
people, how to lie, how to steal, how to sneak, how to hide, but
above all we learned survival involves a state of mind and that a
sense of humor is essential. A good sense of humor, I know, is
survival. Dont ever lose it.
Rob is the
founder and editor of the news site robwire.com and is a
frequent contributor to rob.dailykos.com
and robnotes.blogspot.com