By Caitlin Trude

Collide had the opportunity to hear and listen to Holocaust survivor Betty Cohen’s testimony through the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust’s Survivor Speaker series and participate in a one-on-one interview after she shared her story.

The following includes some Q&A taken from the interview with Cohen along with commentary highlighting the details of her experiences during the Holocaust:

Photo taken by Caitlin Trude

Cohen was born in Amsterdam in 1921, but lived with her family in Hilversum, where she spent most of her childhood with her parents and two older siblings.

All had been relatively normal until the rise of the Nazi Party and the implementation of anti-Semitic laws. Cohen remembers Jewish business owners being forced to relinquish control over their businesses and having to adhere to certain curfews, and Cohen herself was fired from her job working in a department store.

Collide: When all the Jews in your city were forced to move into Amsterdam, and you and your fellow Jewish community members started to lose their jobs or businesses or their cars like you said, and having to follow these certain curfews, at what point did you realize that your life wasn’t going to be what it was before all these things started happening?

Cohen: I’ll tell you right away; when the Germans came in; that was in 1940, and even before, we were scared, you know. But we knew that something was going to happen. … One of my uncles was caught. He tried to hide some of his paintings. … They caught him and he was sent to the death camps. So you had that around you all the time because they’re (the Gestapo) all over; the people (the Jews) were caught and sent away and picked up from the street, especially in Amsterdam. … All they (the Nazis) wanted was to get rid of the Jews as fast as they could. And that was very frightening and stressful.

Collide: Did you ever have any hope, or did you ever think that maybe life could return back to normal?

Cohen: Well, so for “normal,” of course, when we were liberated, but knowing that you have no close family; my brothers and my parents, and aunts and uncles, … some of them also didn’t make it, … so it’s very sad. Every night I talk to them. I think that after I’ve died, I [will] go up and see them all, so I tell them to wait for me, not to spread out too much because I want to be together. Every night after my prayer, I always talk to them, and it makes me feel good.

It was not until 1942 and after her engagement to Al Cohen that their family was forced to move back to Amsterdam, where all Dutch Jews were ordered to relocate.

“God was watching over us, I think, because they (the Gestapo) never came to where we were living,” Cohen said during her presentation.

During this time, the family witnessed families torn from their homes and from each other as the Gestapo officers invaded the Jewish quarter, and Cohen’s father decided to find hiding places in Hilversum until they were able to route an escape to Switzerland.

“We had heard of people getting caught, so we were always very afraid,” says Cohen.

Seventeen people, including Cohen’s family, hid in the home of Nazi resistors for nearly two years before the Gestapo arrested them and sent them to work in Westerbork. Cohen recalls the neighbors’ surprise at the number of Jews who had been hiding in the home when the group was removed from the house.

Cohen recalls the Gestapo saying to family members upon their arrest, “Get out! Only take what you can carry!”

The family who had housed the group were also arrested and later killed for providing refuge to the families.

Cohen and her future sister-in-law Elizabeth were separated from the rest of the group only a month later. This would be the last time Cohen would see her parents and siblings; she and Elizabeth were to be sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where the prisoners were disrobed, disinfected, tattooed with a number, sterilized and sent to work until some were randomly chosen to be sent to the crematorium. Miraculously, Cohen was not sent to the crematorium despite her failed attempt at hiding a weak ankle.

Collide: Throughout your experience, you mentioned that you asked God and you asked yourself, “Why us?” “Why now?” How did you maybe answer that question, since there isn’t necessarily a good answer to that question?

Cohen: I asked God to let it end. Why doesn’t it end?

Collide: Did society or your community ever tell you why this was happening to the Jews specifically? What was maybe some of the rationale they gave?

Cohen: But it didn’t happen alone to the Jews; it happened to other people too. Look at the gypsies, and the homosexuals. It all happened to all of them, you know? And it’s still going on! Not specially to the Jews, but … I’m afraid it will never go [away]. It’s not going away, I don’t think, but I hope it won’t be as bad as it was. I won’t be around, but sometimes I’m afraid for everybody. Like I said, it’s not only the Jews that suffer; it happened to other people too.

As the Russian allies began to approach closer toward the end of WWII, the camp prisoners were sent on death marches and eventually sent by cattle car to Ravensbrück. Shortly thereafter, the prisoners took another cattle car to Parchim in Germany.

On May 5, 1945, Cohen and her fellow prisoners were liberated. At this point, Cohen and Elizabeth had been separated, and Cohen received word that Elizabeth had been killed during a death march from Birkenau.

“I must be strong,” Cohen says, explaining how she was able to survive. “I really have no idea how I did it.”

Collide: A significant aspect of remembering the Holocaust and tragic events like this is to hopefully keep events like those from happening again. But how successful – if at all – do you think society has been in doing this?

Cohen: Not too good, I think. Not really …

Collide: What steps do you think are necessary in order to get closer to keeping these things from happening?

Cohen: Well, it’s up to the governments too, to go and to stop all of this craziness. I don’t know who can make it better; I have no idea. … This talking, it helps me too. … I speak quite a lot … because you relive it again; speaking, you relive it again. Sometimes it’s bit much, but I survived and it has to be told.

Although only a few of Cohen’s relatives survived the Holocaust, she reunited with her fiancée Al after the war. They returned to Hilversum but relocated to Hoboken, New Jersey, then to Atlanta and finally to Los Angeles, where the couple raised their two biological children along with Louis, Cohen’s nephew, whose parents had been killed.

Collide: You’ve spoken for a number of years now; was it difficult the first few times you started telling your story?

Cohen: I couldn’t in the beginning, …[but my] kids kept saying, “You have to; you have to tell your story,” because we’re dying. Don’t forget, we’re all so old; the real survivors are passing on, and my daughter promised that after I’m gone, she’s going to try to speak for me, and I know that some of the second generation’s doing that already. … You have to speak about it; you have to educate.

Collide would like to thank LAMOTH for allowing the author to interview Betty Cohen. To find more information about its Holocaust Survivor Talks, please visit its website’s events page.