"My Mother Worked Miracles During the Holocaust"

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Availability of RSNs varies by zip code and package. And we return to our American stories. On February 5th, 1938, Judas Semet was born in Hungary to a family of entrepreneurs. In March of 1944, the Nazis entered his family's town and forced them onto trains bound for Auschwitz.

They wouldn't make it there. Let's get into the story. Here's the late Judas Semet with his story of survival. In my train, there was this guy I thought was an old man. He had a stubble. And I remember his sweater was gray and he had a black jacket on. He was dead already a few days.

The train would stop every two, three days to take the dead and bury them or burn them. And they took him too. And I was very angry because I lost my pillow. And I lost my windbreaker.

You know, that didn't mean anything. By then, modesty was gone. Desire was gone. We lost sense of smell. The whole train became like a big toilet. One bucket was two, three gallons of water and the other bucket was for toilet purposes. Nobody could get to it anyhow. And also, you know, that bucket was for men and women. We didn't have men and women separate. But they had a bucket with water, two, three gallons, and they put maybe 80, 90 people in it.

There was only a standing room. So my mother talked to the commandant, which she was not supposed to do. And she said, look, we know where we are going, but surely you don't want us to die on the way there. What would the people in Czechoslovakia that we were through, what would they say about the Germans? They were the flower of the Western world. 1933, they won half of the Nobel prizes. 37 and a half percent of that was won by Jews.

What would these people say? What happened to the Germans? So the sergeant took out his pistol and put it to my mother's head. They had a very specific order by Hitler. If a Jew opens his mouth, you shoot him on the spot.

The only way a Jew can talk is if you ask him a question, he may answer. So he was going to do his duty. So the commandant, without even turning around, called him, you dumbcuff, you idiot. Can't you see you killed?

We have nobody to talk to. Now my mother knew the rules, but she figured that if we make it to Auschwitz, we'll be dead in 50 minutes, coming out of the smokestacks. She was very courageous. She got lucky, you know, they replaced the bucket of water with an oil drum filled with water. There were many, maybe hundreds already were sick, would have died without water. So she really saved a lot of people on the train.

So that was actually the first miracle, you know, because this happened with her not once, several times. We ended up in a lumberyard and the owner was an Austrian, major Nazi. He opened his shirt, taunting us with a big sweater, a tooth on his chest. He also had French prisoners of war. They were abiding by the Geneva code and they were fed well, but we were fed starvation diet.

We had starvation diet. My mother would go out at night after working 12 hours and she would go to a village and she would barter with a wife there, get babies. She said, get yarn and get a needle and I'll make clothes for your children. My mother could do anything with her hands. She's the one who put the factory together.

She's the one who taught my father, who was a scholar, who was an intellectual, how to work the machines and everything else. So she was making them clothes for their babies. For that, she would get a little cheese, couple eggs, some bread, not too much because they were not supposed to deal with you see them. So they had to be very careful and she would come probably maybe one o'clock in the morning. She would come back, getting up five o'clock in the morning to go to work again. One night she didn't come home. So we didn't know what happened. By next day, she didn't come, panic started to take over because with that, my mother, we couldn't survive.

There's no way. She was like an eagle spreading their wings and covering us. See, my mother had three qualities. First, she was a beautiful woman. She was short, 4'10", but she was built, you know. Secondly, she wasn't just smart out of the box. She was brilliant.

And thirdly, she had guts. When she was a teenager and her father was an entrepreneur, he was in the wholesale grocery store. He used to go to the grocery store to collect, but that Hungarian was so anti-Semitic.

You know, we don't have enough curses in this country. Go to Hungary. So he was afraid to go to the store. So he sent my mother. She's 15, 16 years old. She walks into the store store.

She puts her hands behind her back, starts walking. The guy knew who she was, so he opened them up. But my mother didn't pay attention. She always told us, don't listen to what they have to say. Let it fly over your shoulder. Watch their hands because words cannot kill you, but their hands can kill you. Didn't pay any attention.

Then in very low voice, she says, well, your shell seems to be stacked pretty well. You don't really need anything today. But you know, people are going to come today, later on. They'll come tomorrow. They'll come the day after.

In a few days, you're not going to have anything to sell. You think my father is going to give you another nickel sword. She came home with the money. But she did that kind of stuff for him many times.

He was fearless. It's good and it's bad. It's one of the things that I inherited from her. So anyhow, without her, there's no way we could make it. A few days later, I think, all of a sudden she showed up. Why didn't they kill her?

What happened? Somebody in the village squealed. So she was arrested, put in jail. In jail, she shared a room with an Austrian beauty, 20 years old maybe. And the captain, he said he was as handsome as Hollywood.

He was so handsome. And my mother would do anything to save us, whatever it took to save us. She never told us why and how. But anyhow, I used to squeeze her. I said, what happened in that prison? And she said, well, the girl, the Austrian girl was a beautiful girl. I said, what was her crime? And she said, because Hitler gave a direct order to all the beauties between 18 and 25 to entertain the soldiers coming home on a furlough. And she, you know, Austria is a Catholic country. And she came from a very good family.

And they hung her. But my mother, she convinced the guy that her four kids and, you know, her husband sickly won't make it without her. She had a way of talking to people. She never, ever raised her voice, not even on us. Our biggest fear regarding my mother was disappointing her. We knew that she loved us so much. First of all, she would do everything, which she did.

Okay. But it wasn't just a mock life. It was the whole body in hotel. You know, so disappointed to disappoint her was terrible. And you're listening to the late Judah Sennett, who is a survivor of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting and who died in September of 2022 at the age of 84, sharing the story of how his mom saved him and the family. He described his mother as having three qualities. She was beautiful. She wasn't just smart. She was brilliant. And she had guts. And he shared some of the stories of her courage. My biggest fear I had was disappointing my mother.

To disappoint her was terrible. When we come back, more of this story from the late Judah Sennett here on Our American Stories. Hi, it's Jenny Garth. We all know the importance of taking care of our physical and mental health. But what about our sexual health? I've been there, feeling totally stuck when it comes to my libido. That's why I started taking Addie.

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Here again is Judah. A few weeks later, trains arrived, finally. They loaded us up on the train, then we arrived in Bergen-Belsen. The method there, unlike Auschwitz, where they killed you right away, the method there was starving you to death. And what happens when you are starved, it kills your immunity system. And the worst thing in the camps was typhoid. Typhoid killed more people than anything else and also dysentery. Now dysentery was because if you don't eat, your stomach starts to shrink, going to the point where you don't have a stomach.

So you put it in and it goes straight out. The whole camp was like a toilet. But the Germans appointed what they called the Judenrat, which was the Jewish committee. Their job was to keep the camp clean. They picked them up for brutality and they had to be brutal because the Nazis watched them. If they were not brutal enough, they would shoot them.

They never had any problem replacing anybody. So in Bergen-Belsen, when we arrived there, we already saw at the gate, there were about two stories of corpses. They kept dying all day. Many of them just gave up, lay down and died. I mean, if you don't have hope, you know, you've been there two, three months, the same, you get weaker and weaker and weaker and so I suffer. You lay down and you die.

Or what you do, you jump on the fence and you die that way. So at that point, that didn't mean anything to me anymore, you know, because that's all you saw all the time. And the starvation continued. There were three men's halls. One for the officers was like a five-star restaurant, the best of everything. The second one was for the guards. The guards usually, there were some Germans, but mostly the local. Hungarians, you had Ukrainians, you had Ukrainians, Lithuanians. They were the worst of the worst. And they were watching.

No. Eventually, I made a friend that was about the same size as myself, the same age. By then, I was seven years old already.

Believe me, by then you were a man. And this friend of mine, we always followed them. The officers coming out of their mess hall, they were always having a wing or they had some other kind of meat they were chewing on. And then when they finished, they threw it on the ground and we threw ourselves on that and grabbed it. There was nothing to eat maybe, but the taste was still there.

And that kind of filled us up. Now in the meantime, the camp was inundated with lice. I mean, the lice was unbelievable. So my mother convinced us to eat the lice.

She said, the lice are bloodsuckers and blood is protein. And you eat that. So between that and what they gave us to eat, which was a small hard dried black bread for the six of us and some colored water that was supposed to be soup. That was our meal for the day.

But my mother did, she broke the bread into olive size and she fed us five, six times a day with a teaspoon of that water. So she was the hero in our story, my mother. So anyhow, we were there for 10 months, maybe 10 and a half months. And then a third train came and they asked for volunteers to get on the train, 2,500. And my mother took us and put us on the train.

And that's another thing that I discussed with her years later. We knew it's a dead train because they were all dead because they were all dead trains. We were supposed to die. And the train was going around and around. They were looking for a place where they could finish us off. But somehow we survived. And eventually, after a few weeks, we stopped in the forest, near Farstleben. And we thought, well, maybe this is where they're going to finish us.

And sure enough, we had a big rumble. It's a tank. We noticed right away that the turret was not aimed at the train. And then the turret opened and the soldier popped up and he didn't have German uniform on. So my father was studying English already.

He was a scholar, so he picked up English very fast. He yelled, Americans, Americans, Americans. And we were saved by the Americans. From there, they took us to Hillersleben.

Hillersleben was a mid-sized town over the Rhine where the Rhine was very broad and very deep. And there was a big bridge, but the bridge was bummed out. So we figured that's where they were. They were going to close the doors and push the train down and just kill 20, whatever, 22.

I don't know how many were still alive. The chances that she took, see, I remember I asked her, you put us on the third train. You know it was that train.

How did you make the decision? She says, I had a choice between the maybe and the sure thing. The sure thing was if we stayed in Bergen-Belsen for another two days, we would be all dead because they stopped feeding or even watering. Look, a healthy man can live without water two, three days. But a sick person, we were already sick.

The maybe was, if I put you on this train, maybe another miracle is going to happen, like the first one. And she was right. She had the right instinct.

And we survived. And they, I spoke to my big brother about it, you know, who's in Israel. And they, I always said, somebody should make a movie about this woman.

I don't know who can play her. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery. And this interview was conducted before Judah died. He's also a survivor of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting.

Antisemitism rearing its head again in his lifetime and so close to home. And by the way, we tell these stories for a reason. There are a few survivors left from the Holocaust. And it was the Americans in large measure in the Allied troops that liberated these camps. And as they showed so vividly in Band of Brothers, all of the Allied troops figured out why we were fighting when they stumbled on these death camps.

That a country like Germany, a beautiful country like Germany, could sink to those depths of depravity. What a sad tale. And what a story of his mother's courage and her intuition. The chances you took, why did you put us on that third train?

He asked his mom. The sure thing or the maybe were the two things she described. Staying in that camp, there was certain death. The maybe getting on that train and hoping another miracle would happen, which it did.

Judas Semet's story, the story of the Holocaust, one story at a time, which we do hear on our American stories. The Unshakable's podcast is kicking off season two with an episode you won't want to miss. Join host Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business, as he welcomes a very special guest, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. Hear about the challenges facing small businesses and some of the uh-oh moments Jamie has overcome.

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