1933
Sara Hedvig Gottdiener was born as the fourteenth of sixteen children in Hajdunanas, Hungary.
1941
In fascist Hungary Jews are systematically persecuted and killed. Sara's father and four of her brothers are drafted into forced labor. Sara begins a life in fear and humiliation.
Sara: „Suddenly we were the accursed Jews and were beaten and persecuted.“
1942
The Nazis shave off the beard of Edward Israel Gottdiener, Sara's father, in Hajdúnánás. A terrible humiliation for Jewish men.
Sara: „My father suffered badly from the humiliation. For him it was as if he had to run naked through the streets.“
1944
The Gottdiener family is taken to the ghetto in Debrecen. Sara begins a life in fear and humiliation. The Jews must surrender all their valuables to the Gestapo and are forced to wear the Jewish star. Then a nightmare for the little girl, Sara had to undergo a “gynecological" investigation. The Nazis were looking for valuables that their parents had allegedly hidden inside the girls.
Sara „It was hellish pain, and as a little girl I did not understand what was happening to me. I did not know what they were doing.“
All Jews are taken from the ghetto in Debrecen to a brick factory outside the city. 40,000 people are provided with four water taps and four toilets. Thee Jewish prisoners were served pork for lunch. From here, the transports to Auschwitz are organized.
1944
On 25 June, in a cattlecar with 96 prisoners, with no water, no food and no toilet, Sara is sent towards Auschwitz. The train to the death camp stops at the Polish border. Sara's train is not listed for destruction and is sent back. What perversion: a person has to appear in a list to be gassed. Sara arrives with her family at the camp in Strasshof, Austria.
A concentration camp is located in Stasshof during the period of National Socialism. 21,000 Hungarian Jews are deported there to forced labor. After their arrival in the camp Sara is forced to strip naked and be "disinfected".
Sara: „In Strasshof women were falling out of the traincars in the heat. Many had menstrual blood running down their legs. Pregnant women's heads were shaven. I was 11 years old and never had seen pregnant women naked. The pregnant women were then sent back to Auschwitz for a second time then. This time they were taken and destroyed.“
1944
Sara Atzmon, her brothers and sisters and her parents are sent to forced labor in Heidenreichstein in Lower Austria. The 11-year old works from morning to night. She receives a slice of bread per day.
On 11 August 1944 her father breaks down, weakened by hard labor and starvation, and dies with Sara standing next to him, an experience she cannot escape from all her life. Her brother Eliezer builds a coffin for his father.
Sara: „That was the last time I cried. After the death of my father, I was unable to cry for 60 years.“
1944
Later, the Gottdieners work in a parachute factory. At the end of November the family is transported by cattlecars back to Strasshof. There they spent three days naked in a disinfection camp. For the winter Sara is issued one red child's shoe and one black woman's heeled shoe. She now has to wear these uneven shoes for half a year and suffers terrible agony.
Again, the family is loaded into cattlecars. This time the transport takes them to Bergen-Belsen.
Sara: „In these shoes I marched into the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 2 December. I thought we had experienced the worst suffering. But now we had landed in hell.“
1944
The Bergen-Belsen camp is a slaughterhouse. Thousands of people are murdered daily by the SS, the corpses stacked in hugh piles. The conditions are incredible. There is hardly any food and water. People cannot wash or change clothes and are full of lice. Thousands die of typhoid. Those who do not die of the disease are given an injection into their thin arms by the SS shortly before the war ends.
For days and weeks Sara has to stand for roll call at Bergen-Belsen in the freezing cold for hours on end. In front of the windows of her barracks, "the Hungarian House," corpses pile up in high mounds.
Sara: “They stole my childhood from me in Bergen-Belsen. We knew no joy or children's birthday parties and played alongside piles of corpses.“
1945
In early April, the SS organizes new transports. Thousands of prisoners spend a week in cattlecars. When the U.S. Air Force bombs a train near Bergen-Belsen, 4000 prisoners escape. The villagers of the area kill them with sticks and rakes. They murdered voluntarily. No one ordered them to do so.
Again the Nazis assemble transports with Jews, supposedly to exchange them for German prisoners of war. On 6 April Sara leaves Bergen-Belsen with such a transport. But the SS guards abandon the cars on the tracks and flee from the advancing Allied troops.
On 13 April 1945 at Farsleben, north of Magdeburg, American troops encounter the abandoned trains. Sara is freed at age 12 and weighs 17 kilos. Of her 16 brothers and sisters in the Gottdiener family, 13 and their mother survived. 60 members of her family were killed by the Nazis.
Sara: “We did not believe that we are free. We had no concept of what that is.“
1945
Sara is brought back to a camp. This time to the liberated concentration camp in Buchenwald. The Swiss Red Cross organizes children's transports to America, Switzerland and Palestine. Sara and her family decide on Palestine without hesitation. Via Paris and Marseille, Sara arrives with her brothers and sisters with the first immigration ship to Haifa, Palestine, on 16 July 1945.
Sara: „When I came to Palestine as a 12-year old girl, I was so happy and excited and just wanted to shout out: 'I'm alive, I'm a free Jewish girl!' I was born again at the age of 12.“
1945
The next camp is already awaiting Sara. Palestine is still under British mandate at that time. To stop the influx of Jews from Europe to Palestine, the British detained thousands in camps for "illegal immigrants". Sara and other children are allowed to enter legally but still detained in the prison camp at Atlit, near the port of Haifa. Barbed wire again, disinfection, separation - and Sara's nightmare – more traincars.
1949
After the War of Independence Sara could do something that she had never been allowed to do - go to school. She enters the boarding school "Mossad Alia" with 200 other orphans. She stays there for 3 ½ years. Later she works in youth groups and is actively committed to the young state of Israel.
Sara: „The Gottdiener family experienced a miracle. Despite the mortal fears and suffering we went through, despite the burning and killing of 60 members of our family, nearly the whole family survived , and this family was actively involved in the founding of Israel.“
1951
Sara joins the Israeli army.
1954
Married to the Israeli-born Uri Atzmon. She has 6 children. The family does not speak about her past at home. Until almost 20 years later, when she begins to give lectures in schools.
Sara: „Future generations will see and understand what hatred and incitement can lead to.“
1964
The family transfers the remains of Sara's father, Edward Israel Gottdiener, from a Christian cemetery in Austria to Israel and burys them in a Jewish cemetery
1987
At the end of the 1980's Sara Atzmon begins to paint, deals with her experiences in the Nazi era emotionally, organizes exhibitions, travels around the world. She is committed to better relations between Jews and Arabs. Sara exhibits her paintings internationally, in Jerusalem (Yad Vashem), in the U.S., in Germany.
2007
A new memorial is opened in Bergen-Belsen. Sara Atzmon gives a moving opening speech.
Sara: „I hear the prayers of the white, bare skeletons. Their wide-open mouths call out - and I am a little girl that looks at them with fear and hope, because they may come back to life. But they did not awaken.“
2008 to 2012
Sara Atzmon travels to the USA, India, Burma, and repeatedly to Germany, showing her unsettling pictures. She calls it "a struggle against forgetting."
