Making Connections: Eva Galler's survivor story related to a passage from Night
Artifact 4: Eva Galler interview Transcript
They took us to a cattle
train. People started to run away from the train, but they were shot. Once on
the train we had to stand because there was no room to sit down. A boy tore the
barbed wires from the train window. The young people started to jump out of the
window. Many jumped. The SS on the rooftop of the train shot at them with
rifles. My father told us, the oldest three, "Run, run--maybe you will
stay alive. We will stay here with the small children because even if they get
out, they will not be able to survive." To me he said, "You run, I
know you will stay alive. You have the Belzer Rebbe's blessing." He was
very religious and he believed this.
My brother
Berele jumped out, then my sister Hannah, and then I jumped out. The SS men
shot at us. I landed in a snowbank. The bullets did not hit me. When I did not
hear anything anymore, I went back to find my brother and my sister. I found
them dead. My brother Berele was 15. My sister Hannah was 16. I was 17
Passage from Night
In the wagon where the bread
had landed, a battle had ensued. Men were hurling themselves against each
other, trampling, tearing at and mauling each other. Beasts of prey
unleashed, animal hate in their eyes. An extraordinary vitality possessed
them, sharpening their teeth and nails...
A piece fell into our
wagon. I decided not to move...I saw, not far from me, an old man
dragging himself on all fours. He had just detached himself from the
struggling mob...He was hiding a piece of bread under his shirt. With
lightning speed he pulled it out and put it to his mouth. His eyes lit up,
a smile, like grimace illuminated his ashen face...A shadow threw himself over
hum. Stunned by the blows, the old man was crying:
"Meir, my little Meir! Don't
you recognize me...You're killing your father...I have bread...for you
too...for you too..."
He collapsed. But his fist was still
clutching a small crust...The old man mumbled something, groaned, and
died. Nobody cared. His son searched him, took the crust of bread,
and began to devour it. He didn't' get fat. Two men had been
watching him. They jumped him. Others joined in. When they
withdrew, there were two dead bodies next to me, the father and the son.
I was sixteen. (Wiesel 101)
Connection
One museum
display was Survivors of the Holocaust…Voices finally spoken. As I was browsing through the different
survivor stories, Eva Galler’s caught my attention. Her story is extremely captivating, but there was one part
that stuck out to me in particular: “I was 17”. When describing the moment when she escaped off of the
cattle train, and then realized her sister and brother who also tried to escape
are lying close to her—dead, she makes it appoint to state her age. This reminded me of a passage from
Night that, similarly, ended with the statement “I was sixteen”. Elie Wiesel made this statement after
he recounts the incident when he saw two people get beaten to a pulp and die in
front of him. Both Galler and
Wiesel share horrific experiences with their audience and then state their age
afterwards. I think this is
because it makes the reader realize that these young kids, still in their
teens, had to witness these horrors due to the fact that Hitler felt the need
to persecute an entire group of people for his own satisfaction. That in itself is deep and should
compel the reader to reflect on the impact the holocaust had on children—I know
for me, as a teenager, I couldn’t even imagine going through the things these
survivors went through.
Both passages
start out with a people desperately wanting freedom. In Galler’s story she and her family have just been hoarded
onto cattle cars and are headed to concentration camps. They, like many other families, have
heard horrible stories about concentration camps and know that they are
probably going to die. People
everywhere are jumping out of the train windows trying to possibly escape the
death that awaits them. Galler’s
father instructs his three oldest children which includes Eva to jump out of
the window and just pray that the SS officers won’t shoot them. This decision was made in haste because
Eva was desperate to survive and her father desperately wanted his children to
survive. Likewise, when the wagons
holding Elie and other Jews were going by German civilians, the German’s
thought it would be funny to throw pieces of bread into the wagons which held
starving malnourished Jews that had not eaten in days. They knew that out of desperation the
Jews would scramble towards the food in hopes of getting some nutrition to help
them live another day, and hoped that this spectacle would entertain them. That’s exactly what the man in Elie’s
wagon did: he crawled to the bread because that was his freedom—his ticket to
living one more day. In doing so a
spectacle was given to the Germans because there became a fight over who got to
eat the bread. All of these
actions were done out of desperation because all of the Jews were starving.
In the middle
of each story, both protagonists encounter others trying to hurt them. Galler had to deal with SS officers
shooting at her from the tops of the cattle car while she was jumping out of
the window and even once she landed in the snowbank. The SS officers didn’t want her to escape, they wanted her
to die a slow death just like the rest of the Jews—they had no mercy. Similarly, the man in the wagon was
stopped by his son. His own flesh
and blood did not want to see him eat food when he
himself was starving and was not able to get to any food.
The resulting
factor in each story is death. In
Wiesel’s story the man in the wagon gets killed by his son and his son gets
killed by other men all over a fight to have a bite of bread. In Galler’s story, both her brother and
sister get shot by SS officers and she is left looking at her kin and now has
no one left to help her stay alive.
Each death in the stories was a result of someone’s hate towards
others. The SS officers hated that
these Jews who were seen as animals had the nerve to try and escape their wrath
and they felt provoked to kill as many escapees as they could. Likewise the men in the wagon felt the
need to succumb to animalistic behaviors and kill a man all because they hated
the fact that he got a hold of bread and they did not
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