Hilda Farber: A Survivor

You never know peoples’ stories. I have known Hilda for years. A feisty woman in her 80s, Hilda has the gift of being able to make people smile with her happy-go-lucky way of looking at life. She’s witty and always quick with a joke.

I happened to be talking to her one Memorial Day. I realized she might have experienced WWII because she was German. I had no idea when she came to this country so I asked her if she had been living in Germany during the war.

“Oh yes. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was 17 years old and living in Austria. I was in the hospital with the flu and happened to be listening to the radio. A speech was being broadcast from the town square just below my window. So I got out of bed to see what all the commotion was about. A man was shouting all sorts of propaganda. This man was Adolf Hitler. The people in the square that day didn’t seem very impressed with the man. Many walked away. But before long shattered windows littered the streets and war was waged. Most Germans didn’t support the war nor were they against the Jews. My friends and neighbors were Jewish. Then a terrible thing happened, worse than the war.”

“What could be worse than the war?” I asked.

“The Gestapo made us choose to live.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We watched as our friends and neighbors were dragged from their houses and pushed onto trains. We tried to stop them, but whoever interfered was also pushed onto the train or shot like a dog in the street. We were forced to live with the guilt of surviving. I ended up working in a bullet factory making bullets to kill the very people we prayed would come and save us. We had no choice. We did what they said or they would shoot us.”

As I watched her papery hands gesture as she told her story, I thought about what this positive, optimistic woman had endured. She made me realize how small and insignificant my problems were. God willing I will never live through the horrors of what she had lived through, and yet she remains amazingly optimistic. You just never know.

- Debbie Shannon