When the train finally arrives at its destination, you discover that you have entered the dreadful world of Birkenau near Auschwitz. Your group is marched past an SS officer who points some prisoners to the left and others to the right. You are young and strong and are selected to be among those who will live. The others are headed directly to the gas chambers and death.
You are assigned to work in the munitions factory for twelve hours a day. Despite the risk of instant death, you smuggle small amounts of ammunition out of the camp and into the hands of the partisans. A few workers who do this are discovered and hanged in a public ceremony, designed to discourage anyone else from this activity. However, that does not stop you.
When the Russian army advances close to Birkenau in November 1944, the camp is evacuated, and you are marched to Ravensbrück camp near Berlin, then to Leipzig, and finally to Dachau. From Dachau you are finally liberated by the American army on April 29, 1945. On the afternoon of April 30, 1945, an American army chaplain, Rabbi David Max Eichhorn, arrived at Dachau, bringing with him a large Sefer Torah which had been hidden in the Treuchtlingen town hall by an official on the November night in 1938 when the synagogue was burned and all the Jews in Treuchtlingen were killed or driven off into the woods. Rabbi Eichhorn leads you and the other survivors in a Torah service.
You are sent to a Displaced Persons camp at Feldafing, but soon you must decide where you will settle. You have decided to stay in southern Germany, in Munich where Hitler first began his political career. Your presence here will testify to the world that Hitler failed, that Jews and Judaism have survived despite the worst terror that the world could offer. For that testimony, you are proud and grateful.
END