The Honey Girl of Auschwitz — a story of survival and forgiveness

In the face of death, Holocaust survivor Esther Basch found life.

“On my 16th birthday, May 28, 1944, is the night I got off the train in Auschwitz,” 95-year-old Basch said.

Basch shared her story with an audience of about 900 people at the Wachholz College Center in Kalispell on Monday, Feb. 25 with introductions from Rabbi Shneur Wolf of the Chabad of the Flathead Valley and Whitefish resident Tanya Gersh, who read Psalms 23.

While filled with tragedy, Basch tells her story of survival to spread a message of overcoming hatred with love and forgiveness.

For days, Basch had stood in a cattle car, holding her mother’s hand, crammed among so many people there was not even room for the dead to lie. There was no food or water. Her mother cried. She would not get to bake her daughter a birthday cake from ingredients she had hidden in the ghetto. 

Once off the train, her father, a rabbi, was sent to the gas chamber. 

“I was still holding hands with my mom so strongly and the Nazis came, tore our hands apart by force,” Basch said.

Mother and daughter were sent in opposite directions. Basch would never see her again, nor would she learn of her parents’ fate until later.

Sent to the barracks, Basch climbed into a bunk filled with strangers, where she would spend sleepless nights over three and a half months.

BASCH WAS 14 years old when she was made to wear the yellow Star of David badge identifying her as a Jew — an outsider. Strangers and her Christian friends called her family ethnic slurs and “beat us mercilessly” out on the street.

“I did not understand,” she said.

When her teacher saw the yellow badge, the teacher called her “a dirty Jew,” and said she wasn’t allowed an education.

“I didn’t even finish eighth grade. I went home crying because I actually liked school,” she recalled.

For two years her family endured the abuse until the Nazis forcibly removed them from the home Basch’s mother and grandmother grew up in, placing them in an enclosed ghetto. Ghettos were “city districts” used to segregate and control Jews under miserable conditions, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

“It just so happens that they put us into a house right across from our house. And we had to watch how the neighbors from the right took all our belongings, our cow, geese and chickens, everything. But the neighbor from the left risked his life to come out in the middle of the night, called out my father’s name and threw a piece of bread over the fence because he knew we were starving. 

“If he would’ve been caught he would have been shot on the spot, but he risked his life. So there are good people and not-so-good people,” she said.

Sitting in a chair on the stage by Basch was one of her daughters, Rachel Turet, who expounded on the neighbor’s heroism and spoke to the complexity of the moral dilemma.

“We would all love to perceive ourselves to be — always gonna be the good guy. We would have been the guy … throwing that piece of bread. But unfortunately, it doesn't always work that way,” Turet said. “Picture yourself in your room, very poverty stricken and you're trying to feed your family. You can barely make it day to day and a Nazi approaches you and says if you tell them where that Jew is, I'll give you everything he has. It's just not black and white.”

After six weeks, the family was loaded into the cattle cars headed to Auschwitz, the largest of the German concentration and extermination camps, and the site where more than 1.1 million men, women and children died, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. 

A total of six million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

THE THOUSANDS of women imprisoned at Auschwitz were counted twice a day, morning and night. Basch said some were made to stand or kneel for hours.

It was during these daily counts that Basch came face to face with the infamous Josef Mengele, an SS physician who performed deadly and inhumane experiments on prisoners and selected victims to be sent to the gas chambers.

“I was standing in line with four sisters from my hometown. The youngest was my best friend,” Basch said.

She said Mengele used a silver cane to point at a prisoner he wanted for the experiments or send to the gas chamber.

“One day we're standing in line and it looks to me like he’s pointing that horrible cane at me, so I step out of the line,” Basch said.

Driving the cane into her stomach, he pushed her back and instead selected her best friend, she said.

She would live to see another day, but took on an added burden.

“Up to today, I have guilt feelings because I was supposed to be dead. But God had other plans,” Basch said.

Prisoners who couldn’t take the torture any longer would grab or run into electrified fencing to their deaths.

“If they touch it they won’t suffer anymore,” Basch said. “In fact, many times I had to look at the barbed wire because I couldn’t take the torture, but in front of me came my parents’ faces and I could not touch it. What if they are alive and I’m not?”

She would face death again before long.

In the barracks, women deemed healthy enough to do hard labor were shoved to the back to be sent to the labor camps, including a woman she had befriended who became like a sister. Others were sorted into a group to be sent to their deaths.

By then, Basch was emaciated.

“I was like a skeleton,” she said. “They looked at me and pushed me away.”

Standing there crying, a heavy barrier fell. 

“And I snuck in,” Basch said, to follow her friend.

“I wasn’t supposed to be here. But God had other plans for me,” she said.

Turet said her mother’s belief in divine intervention is a commonality among the Holocaust survivors she’s met.

“The thing that is similar in all Holocaust survivors that I've ever spoken to is that they were part of the miracle. A miracle was given to them and that's why they survived because 75% of European Jews were murdered,” Turet said. 

She was sent to Fallersleben where she was forced to work 12- to 24-hour days handling armaments over nine and a half months. According to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, life expectancy in a forced labor camp was six months.

Basch was able to get another glimpse of good in humanity in a time of need after she was beaten on account of two other women arguing over food. A woman saw the pain she was in as she struggled to climb into her bunk and worked in her place, taking her spot in line during the daily counts.

“And so she saved my life,” she said.

AS ALLIED forces neared the concentration camps, and with the Third Reich on the precipice of defeat, the SS got their orders to evacuate prisoners on “death marches,” according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

“Many of us died on the road. No food. No water. Just walking and walking for days and days,” she said.

She survived the march, making it to Salzwedel. 

“And this is where I found my so-called sister; she was working in that labor camp. We were very happy to see each other but the Nazis locked us in … and shut the gate closed and disappeared,” she said.

“Two weeks later [on April 14, 1945] the American soldiers came, shot the lock open, and said, ‘You are free,’” she said. 

But no one understood English.

“They found us a Jewish soldier that told us in Jewish, ‘You are free. Go into town and take whatever you like,’” she said.

She didn’t want anything other than to go home and find her parents. That was until she spotted a “big, big jar of honey.”

Basch scooped it up with her fingers.

“I got deathly ill by the time I got back to the camp and the soldiers took me to the infirmary. I was there for four weeks and they called me the honey girl,” she said.

The soldiers were at the liberated camp through September. On the Fourth of July the soldiers celebrated with drinks and fireworks. Although her mother didn’t understand English, she could “feel the patriotism in the air,” Turet said, and was overcome with emotion.

Seventy years later, Turet would search for and reunite her mother with one of the American soldiers, Max Lieber, who liberated the camp.  

BASCH WENT on to the next path in her arduous and lengthy journey to get to a region formerly part of Palestine, but along the way met her future husband, Joe. On that journey, she spent six months in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany.

“We fell in love on the road, both of us. But we realized it would take a long, long time to get to Palestine, so we decided to get married,” she said.

Once pregnant, the young couple moved up in line to be admitted to Palestine by the British.

War found the young family again.

“The 1948 war broke out, the War of Independence, and my husband went into the army right away … and three of his brothers went with him and one of his brothers died,” she said. 

At her father-in-law's behest, they made plans to emigrate to the U.S. He was living in Toledo, Ohio.

They were able to get Canadian visas and lived in Windsor, Ontario for six years where her father-in-law could visit on Sundays. In 1958, they got their U.S. visas.  

“I am very proud to be an American citizen,” she said to the audience’s applause. 

But America was not free of anti-Semitism.

A black and white photo of Basch leaning against a metal support beam in a Brooklyn, New York subway was displayed on the screen. She said her husband took it  “to show people the war is not over yet.” 

“So that’s our introduction to Brooklyn,” Turet said. “... a pole with a swastika on it.”

Turet warned the audience to be careful what they say or teach children, having also been the victim of anti-Semitism. Turet didn’t learn about what her parents survived until her late teens.

“I knew somehow there was a connection between my parents’ nightmares, which was almost every night, screaming in the night. If somebody knocked on the door unexpectedly, they froze. Uniforms terrified them,” Turet said. “So I had the sense that my family was not like everybody else’s family.”

When she told her elementary teacher she had to miss school for Yom Kippur, her classmates learned she was Jewish.

“... all the other 6-year-olds had seen and learned probably quite by accident but they would wait for me every day after school to beat me because ‘I killed Christ.’ They'd heard that Jews drank Christian babies’ blood. They thought I had horns.

“It was so awful because if you think about it, that all comes from jokes — from very cruel jokes and there is no race or religion or country that has not had similar things happen to them. I mean, the Chinese who built the railroads and the African Americans, who we brought here — that everybody has had their share of hate and misunderstanding. And if we were all a little more careful and showed the kids tolerance instead of … racial jokes [it] would be such a much better world to live in.”

BASCH’S STORY ends with forgiveness. 

It is an unusual ending for a Holocaust survivor, but for Basch, she had suffered enough hatred and death. 

She explained this to an interviewer recording her and her husband’s testimony for a nonprofit founded in 1994 by “Schindler’s List” director Steven Spielberg. The nonprofit, now called the USC Shoah Foundation, documents the testimony of Holocaust survivors such as Basch, making it accessible for research and education.

At the end of the conversation, the interviewer asked how the couple felt about Germans today.

“I said I cannot forget the horror they put me through, but I can forgive. Because if I don’t forgive, if I hold a grudge, I only hurt myself. This woman from Hollywood hugged me, telling me I was the first Holocaust survivor to answer this question the way I did. But I believe it,” she recalled.

While she doesn’t have a photo of her parents, she remembers them by what they taught her as a child: To do good in the world; love God and others regardless of race or religion; and forgive. She said this is how she learned to live a happy life.

Following the presentation, a long line of audience members waited to meet Basch, including Piper Ten Eyck, a Glacier High School sophomore. With her arms outstretched, the two hugged and spoke. Walking away, the 15-year-old was overcome with emotion.

“I mean especially after hearing what Esther [Basch] had to say today. It’s the perspective that she still has on life — is better than so many people had,” she said, pausing to wipe away tears. “Even — even myself. And I think the fact that she was able to endure what she did and still be able to share love with the world I think is amazing.”

The Honey Girl of Auschwitz was hosted by Chabad of the Flathead Valley and Flathead Valley Community College.

Hilary Matheson may be reached at 758-4431 or hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.

    Piper Ten Eyck, 15, of Kalispell, meets Holocaust survivor Esther Basch, 95, at the Wachholz College Center Monday Feb. 25, 2024. Basch was 16 when taken to Auschwitz and spoke about her experience of survival and experience. (Hilary Matheson/The Daily Inter Lake)