Ann Golda Rosenheck

Born Ann Feig, she was the youngest of five children in a large Jewish family in Czechoslovakia, a republic that emerged from the former Austro-Hungarian empire. It was bordered by Hungary, Ukraine, Poland and Germany. In 1938, the country was forced to cede it’s western and northern borders under the Munich Agreement. Later, part of the country where the Feig family lived was returned to Hungary. By March 1939, German troops occupied former Czechoslovakian territories.

For Rosenheck, her family’s nightmare began in 1944 when two men — one in a Nazi uniform; one a Hungarian — came to their home and gave her family 20 minutes to pack. Two of her brothers had already been taken to labor camps as had her sister’s husband. Another brother had escaped while at university.

The family — including Rosenheck, her parents, her sister and her sister’s two children — were taken deep into Hungary to a ghetto where Jews were forced to live. A few weeks passed, and the family was collected and loaded onto a cattle car so packed with people it was difficult to move.

“ ... It was one nightmare, small nightmare turned into a bigger nightmare then to a bigger nightmare.”
Three-and-a-half days later, the cattle car arrived at Auschwitz.
There, she was separated from her family. First, it was her father who was taken away.
“Papa hugged us and cried,” Rosenheck said. “I saw him walk off ... “

Rosenheck was taken with her sister, her sister’s children and her mother and placed in a line. They came before Josef Mengele, a doctor at Auschwitz nicknamed the “angel of death.” He ordered the 13-year-old to go left and her mother, sister and her sister’s children to go right.

“I walked off to the left, and they walked off to the right,” she said. “They went straight into the gas chamber. I on the other hand was brought into a barrack.”

Rosenheck was eventually moved to a camp at Dachau, where she was liberated by American forces on April 29, 1945. She was 14.

In 1948, she immigrated to the United States, where she lived with an aunt and an uncle. She eventually married Ike Rosenheck in 1949. The two had known each other in Czechoslovakia and had met again after the war ended.

Now 78 and widowed, Rosenheck has shared her story with school children and as a volunteer with the Miami Beach Holocaust Memorial Center in south Florida. In 2007, she finally returned to what was once her country.

“Believe it or not, it was beautiful,” she said.

http://m.dothaneagle.com/archives/holocaust-survivor-to-share-story...

http://www.thursdayreview.com/AnnRosenheckHolocaust.html

Original birth record states she was born on 1927. she claimed she was 13 years old when arrived to Auschwitz on 1944 and therefore was born on 1931.