My Survival Depended on My Parents’ Right Decision & a Lot of Luck

featured guest:
Holocaust survivor Frieda Allweiss

may 7, 2021

Frieda Allweiss was born on May 21st, 1933 in Chortkow, Poland. In 1939 the Hitler/Stalin (Nonaggression) pact divided Poland, and Russia occupied Chortkow until June 1941, when Germany broke the pact, invaded Chortkow, and began killing Jews. Frieda’s craftsman father was conscripted into the Russian army, and Frieda, 8, and her mother fled, beginning a six-month odyssey trying to stay ahead of the Nazis. Taking only what they could carry, they boarded a train with other families on the run. They endured cold, hunger, fear, Nazi bombings, and overcrowded cattle cars with no sanitation facilities. Constantly on the move, they went from Kiev to a collective watermelon farm at Stalingrad, surviving scarlet fever and then typhus, which left her unconscious for several weeks.