DAUNTED BUT UNDETERRED

There are times in life when one hears about events so horrific that they can only describe them as ‘incredible’ or ‘unbelievable.’ Judy Cohen, a Holocaust survivor, shares what it was like to be a part of one of history’s blackest, most ‘unbelievable’ moments

- CECE M. SCOTT

She was 15½ years old when the horrors began. Her 16th birthday was marked in Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, reportedly one of the worst Nazi death camps of the Second World War. There was, of course, no celebration, no cake, no balloons, no happy gathering of friends or presents from family members. In fact, Judy (Weissenberg) Cohen did not even know where some of her family members were — her parents, Margit and Sandor, or her brothers. Her sisters, Erzsebet, Klari and Evi, were in the camp with Cohen — their youngest sibling — and they surreptitiously whispered a “happy birthday” to her on that miserable September 17 day in 1944.

Describing herself as an everyday Jewish school girl, Cohen lived in Debrecen, Hungary, with her family and her six siblings. It was a religious life, one that is common to modern Orthodox Jews. “There was nothing extraordinary about me,” Cohen says. “I was in high school, in Grade 9, my father owned a store and my mother looked after our big family. Although we were not rich, we lived quite comfortably.

And while we Jewish citizens lived under the restrictions and edicts that were imposed by the Miklós Horthy regime starting in May 1938, our lives at that point were not in immediate peril.”

Mischievous and determined, Cohen shares some of her childhood memories in her new book A Cry in Unison, published by the Azrieli Foundation (September 2020). In one of the stories, Cohen reminisces about coming home one night and telling her parents that she’d eaten the ear of a pig at a friend’s house, because she was told that while the pig itself was not kosher, the ear was OK to eat, as it was on the outside of the pig.