The Nazi soldiers grabbed the 5-year-old Jewish girl from her teenage sister's arms. They put the blond-haired, blue-eyed little girl on a truck in Vilna, Poland, and took her to Auschwitz, the concentration camp where some 1 million Jews were shoved into gas chambers and murdered.
A year later, after the Soviets had liberated Poland, the teenager saw her little sister's name scrawled on the wall of the concentration camp.
She never saw her little sister again. Just like she never saw her father again, after the Nazis put him on a truck bound for another death camp.
To better understand
To learn more about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Holocaust, you can visit the Holocaust Museum and Study Center in Spring Valley, in Rockland County. Call 356-2700 or go to www.holocauststudies.org.
Can you understand why a holiday — Passover — commemorating the struggle for liberation of ancient Jews from slavery still means so much to the woman who had her sister torn from her arms?
Let the woman, 85-year-old Dr. Paula Neyman of Monroe, tell you.
"We have always been fighting for liberation," she says. "Always."
But this year, Passover means even more to Jews like Neyman, a pediatrician.
The first night of Passover, Monday, coincides this year with the 68th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. That was the first time during the Holocaust that Jews armed themselves against the Nazis and fought back. They fought back even though some 300,000 of their fellow Jews in the walled-in ghetto had already been sent to die in the Treblinka death camp. They fought back even though countless other Jews, including children, were left with parched yellow skin, boney and starving, sprawled on the streets of ghetto, too weak to walk, let alone fight a battle they surely knew would end in their annihilation.
The link between the anniversary of two events that symbolize a people's struggle against oppression — the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Passover — resonates even with those who can barely imagine the horrors.
"It's certainly a powerful connection," says Rabbi Ari Perten of Neyman's synagogue, Temple Eitz Chaim in Monroe. "It shows that even though Passover was in biblical times, the quest for human freedom is very real, timeless."
But there's another reason this Passover means so much to Paula Neyman.
After Nazis tore her sister, Linka, from her, and after Vilna was destroyed, Neyman was taken to another Jewish ghetto, Riga, in Latvia.
It was Passover when the Nazis brought her there.
Even though the Jewish men there were imprisoned, they managed to bring young Paula Neyman the symbol of the holiday, the symbol of the fight against oppression — matzo. The unleavened bread was what the ancient Jews took with them when they escaped slavery in Egypt. The Jews didn't have time to wait for the bread they were baking to rise, so they survived on that matzo.
The matzo the prisoners gave Neyman in that prison camp 68 years ago was unlike the matzo she will eat Monday night when she sits down for the meal called a Seder at a table set with the ruby red dishes she only uses for Passover.
The matzo she ate during the Holocaust was baked in secret, by Jewish prisoners who had to hide it from their Nazi captors.
Her piece was "maybe a square inch," she says.
"And it was hard and dry, like cardboard."
But what the matzo stood for — freedom — was something as big and bold as life itself for Jews like Neyman, who had just had her little sister ripped from her arms and sent to death.
"I will never forget it," she says.
"Never."