Had it not been for Alexandra MacMurdo Reiter’s grandfather, K. Heidi Fishman would’ve never existed. Through a fortuitous chain of events, the two women discovered in January that Reiter’s paternal grandfather, Stefan Ryniewicz, used a fake foreign passport to help save Fishman’s maternal grandparents from being among the 6 million Jews who were killed during the Holocaust.
A Scottish "Holocaust heroine" and quiet champion of educating girls helped save many Jews in Hungary before dying herself in a concentration camp. Jane Haining, who cared for hundreds of Jewish girls at the Scottish Mission School in Budapest during World War Two, died at Auschwitz camp after the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944.
In 1961, sixteen years after Eric Vogel leaped from a transport train headed toward the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, he recounted his escape for Downbeat, an American jazz magazine: “This is a story of horror, terror, and death but also of joy and pleasure, the history of a jazz band whose members were doomed to die.”
Institutions of memory such as Sachsenhausen in Germany and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland play an important, and unique, role in educating people about the horrors of the Holocaust and of the Nazi regime. For millions of visitors annually, these institutions bear witness to the unthinkable crimes that took place on their grounds and expose people to the visceral discomfort associated with being in a former concentration camp.