Holocaust survivor Rena Finder spoke about her experiences in Oskar Schindler’s factory and in Auschwitz at an event last Wednesday held by Facing History and Ourselves, an international nonprofit organization whose goal is to engage with and educate students about racism and anti-Semitism. The talk, sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies, was held to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a series of attacks against the Jews in Nazi Germany that is often seen as the beginning of the Holocaust.

Finder was born in Krakow, Poland in 1929. In 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, a lot changed, she explained. “It was like overnight. From being a little girl, I became an enemy of the state.”

That same year, Nazis started sending Jewish children under the age of 10 who resided in Krakow to farms where they would grow food for the German army. Finder was 10 years old at the time, so her parents changed her birthdate, making her seem two years older to prevent her from being separated from her family. 

Finder said she remembered the moment she realized that even though the Polish people of Krakow were also occupied, most were allowed to go to school, keep their shops open and go about their lives without paying attention to what was happening to the country’s Jews. “All of a sudden, nobody saw or cared what was happening to their neighbors,” she said. 

The Germans began moving the Jews in Krakow to the ghetto. Finder recounted when her family left for the ghetto. There was a group of Polish people, many of them young, terrorizing them as they walked by, she said. “Polish people … were throwing stones at us, they were throwing mud at us, and they were screaming, ‘Good riddance Jews, don’t come back!’”

According to Finder, soldiers would often search the ghetto, looking for people to send away. “Every day, every morning, every evening, during the day, in the middle of the night, there were always searches,” she said.

She remembered one search in particular during which her mother made her hide in a pile of dirt and leaves. “We lay there, hardly breathing, and we could hear shooting when they found people hiding. There was breaking windows, there was throwing furniture outside. And it seemed like forever.”

One day, Finder’s father was arrested and taken away by the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany. “They told me that my father was working for the underground, which was not true,” Finder said. “I never saw him again.”

Life in the ghetto became increasingly unbearable, with a shortage of food and the constant danger of being shot, Finder explained. 

Eventually, Finder and her mother were sent to work for German industrialist Oskar Schindler at his factory. “I will never forget coming into the factory, and he was standing there, and I said, ‘He must be sent by God. That must be an angel,’” Finder said.

Finder remembered being in awe of the fact that everyone who worked at the factory had enough to eat and had access to medical care. “We were surrounded by people who wanted to murder us, kill us, and he [Schindler] was somebody who actually cared.”

In 1944, the Schutzstaffel, also known as the SS, forced Schindler to shut down his factory. Finder, her mother and other factory workers were placed on an overcrowded train to be relocated. They had no water and no place to sit. 

“When the train stopped and the doors opened … I remember seeing miles and miles of barbed wire. And then I looked up. [There were]hundreds — it seemed to me like hundreds — of soldiers with dogs, screaming, yelling, dogs barking,” she said. “And I look[ed] up and I [saw] the sign: Auschwitz-Birkenau.”

While they were waiting outside the train, still without water, Finder said they tried to catch snowflakes. “We were so thirsty,” she said. “It was snowing, so I remember reaching out — we were all reaching out — to get some snowflakes. But these were not snowflakes. Those were ashes.”

Finder talked about how dehumanizing her experience at Auschwitz was, especially when the soldiers cut off her and her mother’s hair. “I said to my mother, ‘Now we are dead, so we are not going to suffer anymore.’ And my mom said, ‘No, we are not dead, we are alive.’ But when I looked at my mom I did not recognize her, because without our hair, I just didn’t really feel human anymore,” she said.

Finder explained that while she was in the camp, Schindler was doing everything in his power to save his former factory workers. He made a list of his workers, now known as Schindler’s list, who would be saved from the death camps and instead sent to his new factory in Brunnlitz, Czechoslovakia. 

While Schindler was working on reclaiming his workers, Finder and her mother continued to suffer at Auschwitz. “It was a horror every day, it was a horror at night, and we didn’t have enough food. We were getting sick, we had lice,” she said.

Eventually, Schindler’s bribes of and negotiations with the SS worked, and Finder and her mother were among the 300 women put on a train to Schindler’s factory in Brunnlitz. “It was one miracle after another,” Finder said. “Oskar Schindler would not allow them to kill us.”

Finder and her mother stayed at Schindler’s factory until the Russians liberated Brunnlitz in 1945. They moved to a displaced persons camp, where they stayed until Finder moved to the United States in 1948. Finder and her mother were the only ones in their family to survive the Holocaust. 

Finder concluded her story by discussing the importance of passing down stories of the Holocaust to younger generations. “It cannot be forgotten. Forgetting is dangerous,” she said. “I try to tell young people that they have the power to make changes. … And I try to tell young people not to hate, because hate is the worst emotion.”

At a Q&A session following the talk, an audience member asked Finder about how she felt about the mass shooting that took place at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last month. She replied, “I feel like I am in 1938.”