By Jessica Easthope
A simple cup of morning coffee jogs a distant memory. It doesn’t take much to bring Rosalie Simon back in time.
“I forget what happened yesterday, but this I can’t forget. I wish I would,” she said.
There are some things a life of happiness, family, friends, and hobbies can’t erase.
“I heard an announcement on the loudspeaker. ‘Those of you that are going to the left will receive more bread.’ As I was walking to the gas chamber with my mother, I made a quick decision to turn around and get my sisters and we’d all be together, and that’s what I did without saying anything to my mother. I never saw her again. I was devastated for leaving her, but that’s how I got saved on the day upon arrival from being killed.”
In 1944, Rosalie was 12 years old when her parents and her five siblings were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the center of the Nazi Party’s “Final Solution.”
“After being there a few days, I asked someone, ‘What are those flames coming out of the chimney?’ And she said, ‘You don’t know? This is where they burned your mother, your father, your sisters and brothers. This is where you’re going to wind up soon.’”
Despite having been hand-selected for the gas chamber by the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele, Rosalie managed to escape more than once, thanks to her four older sisters who were selected to be transported to a labor camp, and the kindness of a complete stranger.
“I said, ‘Let me out. I don’t want to die.’ I thought maybe somebody is going to hear me. I jumped up and down, jumped up and down, ‘Please let me out.’ Well, there was a mother and a daughter. The daughter was sent to the gas chamber. The mother couldn’t take the pain of seeing her child going to the gas chamber by herself. She volunteered to go with her daughter and die together. There was somebody who was helping Dr. Mengele with the selections. She happened to be a Jewish woman with red hair. She opened the door, and she gave me a striped dress, and she told me, ‘Run.’”
All five sisters made it out and transformed their lives.
“What I have to say will be hard to read,” she said.
Today, at 94 years old, Rosalie has given hundreds of talks. Her memoir, Girl in a Striped Dress, has been adapted into a one-woman play and performed by students to keep her story alive.
“I was told that Hitler was a great man and just wanted the best for his country.”
With rising antisemitism around the world, Rosalie warns that hate starts small but can grow rapidly without education and compassion to stop it.
“I just want this hate to stop. All I can do is teach the young people against hatred.”
Her past remains a part of her. And as for the girl in the striped dress:
“I know her well, but I’m not her anymore.”