Fritzie Fritzshall talks for her harrowing experience in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps
“The story I am about to tell you is not a beautiful story,” Fritzie Fritzshall told the audience at Chabad Center for Jewish Life & Learning in Wilmette on Feb. 21.
She started her narrative of surviving the Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi concentration camp as a girl raised in an Orthodox family on a farm in what is now Czechoslovakia. Her father moved to the United States when she was very young, leaving behind Fritzshall, her mother and two younger brothers.
Fritzie Fritzshall
Fritzshall, who is president of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, recalled her early years as peaceful, attending school and having friends and neighbors who were Jewish and Christian. “We lived in peace with our neighbors,” she said. But all of that changed when Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany and took everything from the German Jews, eventually sending them to Poland. Fritzshall remembered German Jews traveling from Poland to her village, where they looked for Jewish homes marked by a mezuzah on the door, begging for food. Her family helped them and were fearful, but she said “we never thought this would happen to us.”
Soon the Nazis came to occupy her hometown as well. First Fritzshall was told that she could no longer attend school, and then she was forced to wear a yellow star sewn on her clothes. “You are now living in a Christian world. You are not wanted and you are identified,” she said.
All of their possessions were taken from them — their livestock, bank accounts, everything — until they were forced to steal food from their own farms and weren’t allowed to go out at night. On the last day of Passover, the family heard a knock on the door at night and were told by Nazi soldiers to gather their belongings. All of the Jews in the area were being relocated to a ghetto that had been created from a school. A fence surrounded the building, which was guarded by Nazi soldiers and dogs.
“We couldn’t understand why. We hadn’t done anything wrong. Why were we being punished?” Fritzshall said.
Her family lived and worked at the ghetto for a short time, before they were relocated to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a concentration camp in Poland. Fritzshall recalled being taken to a train station and pushed into a cattle car with her siblings, mother and grandparents. “This was when we knew wherever we were going was not going to be good,” she said.
There were 80 to 90 people in the car already, which had no windows, seats or bathroom. “The fear of the unknown was so thick you could cut it,” she said.
They arrived at Auschwitz during the night and were greeted by bright lights and soldiers barking orders in German, a language they did not understand. “By the time the doors opened half of the people in my compartment were dead,” including her grandfather, she said.
In addition to soldiers, there were two men in striped uniforms with shaved heads. The men were Jewish prisoners whose job it was was to help empty the compartments. “Remember when you get off you are 15,” they whispered in Yiddish to the children on the train. Fritzshall lined up with women 15 and older as she got off the train, even though she was 13 years old. Younger children — including her brothers — were taken directly to gas chambers. She was separated from her mother, who also died at Auschwitz.
Fritzshall remembered crying as her head was shaved after entering the concentration camp. But she was reunited with her aunt, who protected her. “It was due to her that I am standing here today,” she said. “She was the one who took care of me and put her arms around me everyday.”
One day Fritzshall’s aunt was chosen to be relocated on a truck. Fritzshall was lined up with other women to be sent to the gas chamber, but she lingered at the back of the line hoping to go with her aunt. When it was Fritzshall’s turn, she was taken with a few others to a different area to do slave labor in a factory. The conditions were horrid, she said, but since she was the youngest, all of the other prisoners gave her crumbs from their bread to help her survive so that she could share their story.
“I have been their messenger all these years,” Fritzshall explained. “I tell the story so that all of you know their story. You need to know your history. Yes it is my history, but it is also your history,” she said.
During a death march from Auschwitz, Fritzshall was liberated by the Russian army. She eventually moved to the United States where she was reunited with her father after the war.
And she committed to sharing her story. In 1978, a group of neo-Nazis planned a march in Skokie. In response, Fritzshall and other Holocaust survivors decided to join each other to teach people about their experiences. What began as a storefront on Oakton grew into the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie, where today Fritzshall is president. The museum has some 400 volunteers, and over 500 students visit the museum daily to learn about the Holocaust.
Fritzshall continues to be dedicated to her role as messenger. “This is what we do. We teach about the past so that the whole world can learn from the Holocaust,” she said.