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A Holocaust Survivor Tells Her Story on Hannukah
(Jerusalem Post) Greer Fay Cashman - At a Hannukah candle-lighting ceremony that took place at the President's Residence on Monday, Polish-born Holocaust survivor Hannah Weinstein described how for 60 years she had been silent and afraid. "I didn't speak. I was terrified to go from one room to another in case someone was hiding under the bed. I was scared to stand near the window in case there was someone outside waiting to attack me." But she always wanted to be normal "like everyone else." As a child, she had spent a year and a half in the ghetto, then three years living like an animal in the forest, wearing the same dress every day, she said. A non-Jewish friend had helped her family and another to escape from the ghetto and hid them in his house. But the neighbors noticed that he was buying too much food and came to check him out. First, they shot him and his family, then they turned their guns on the Jews. Weinstein's mother lay on top of her to protect her and was killed. Weinstein was wounded, but lay still as did all the others, pretending to be dead. When the villagers left, the survivors got up and made their way to the forest - three little girls and their father. There was nothing to eat in the forest except leaves. When the war was over, the three little girls emerged from the forest and sat by the roadside, waiting for someone to find them. The person who did was Lena Kuchler, who was looking for her family, but found only hungry children on the road or in refugee camps. She became famous as the surrogate mother of a hundred children whom she led walking from Poland to Israel.