Remembering victims and survivors of the Holocaust 

When his father lost his store, Kolben said that he had to start working as a grave digger — and his father joined him. By 1938, his brother was sent to a concentration camp known as Dachau. His father was able to get his brother out by 1939 and his brother was silent when he returned home. 

In 1939, Kolben said that he saw mass violence on the streets and remember the Nazis breaking store windows and writing slurs on the sidewalk. He said that the Jewish community had to wash it off. Kolben and his family had difficulties surviving. His mother died of “a heart problem” and his family went to the ghetto Theresienstadt in 1942. 

After staying there for two years, Kolben was sent to Auschwitz. “My father went to the right, I went to the left. And I said, ‘This is my father. I want to go with him.’ This man, he had a whip and he whipped me with my bag and I was running to the left,” he said. “So from that date on, that was the end of my father. I never saw my father again.”

Soon, Nazis asked for volunteers to go to Buchenwald, so Kolben said that he would. He said that at Auschwitz, he noticed that people were being starved, so that’s why he volunteered. Kolben was sent from Auschwitz to Dauchau — specifically to Kaufering, which is a concentration camp within Dauchau. He said that he watched many people be murdered, including for stealing food. 

“I saw people between the fence. They got caught stealing potatoes, they put potatoes in their mouth. You stayed between the two wires for many, many hours,” he said. “When they didn’t want to live anymore, they just touch the wire and they fell over. When anything you steal, they put you between the wires.”

https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2023/1/26/23572626/holocaust-remembrance-day-2023?_amp=true

Remembering victims and survivors of the Holocaust