Holocaust survivor Sara Moses to share story at CSU that Anne Frank didn't live to tell

If Anne Frank had lived through the horrors of the Holocaust, the story she would tell is that of Sara Moses, an 84-year-old survivor of the infamous Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where as many as 50,000 Jewish people imprisoned by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi forces died.

Moses was in the same camp as a young girl, barely alive when British troops arrived to liberate her and thousands of others on April 15, 1945.

She was 7 years old, dying of starvation and suffering from typhus and typhoid fever.

“They thought I was a baby,” she said. “I was just a tiny skeleton on the floor, unable to move, in very critical condition. One of the English soldiers when he found me on my cot, he found this little skeleton. He stroked my head, and he cried. His tears fell on me.”

That was just a month or two after Frank, who was 15, died along with tens of thousands of other women and children imprisoned there, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website. Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl,” published by her father after her death, is the most well-read description of the horrors Jews faced in German-occupied countries under Hitler’s rule.

As many as 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, including an estimated 50,000 at Bergen-Belsen, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia and Holocaust Resource Center.

“Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen from starvation and typhus,” Moses said. “At that time, I was right where she was, also infected with typhus, starving. ... I lived to tell what Anne Frank would tell if she was alive. That’s what makes my story so important.”

Moses, who lives in Denver, will tell that story at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 1, at Colorado State University’s Lory Student Center main ballroom as part of a Holocaust Awareness Week organized by Students for Holocaust Awareness, Associated Students of CSU, the Kaplan family and others.

Other events, all free and open to the public at the Lory Student Center, include a showing of the film “Denial,” at 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 27, in the theater; a lecture and discussion led by CSU assistant professor Carolin Aronis and doctoral candidates and Jewish students titled “Antisemitism Today: From the World to CSU” from noon to 2 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 28, in the Longs Peak Room (room No. 302) and a memorial and memory walk at 1 p.m. Friday, March 3, on the plaza. A field of flags flying at the plaza throughout the week represent lives lost in the Holocaust, organizers said.

“In today’s troubled times, it is an increasingly important and rare opportunity to hear and learn from the living testimony of Holocaust survivors,” said Rabbi Yerachmiel Gorelik, an advisor to Students for Holocaust Awareness and director of the Rohr Chabad Jewish Center of Northern Colorado. “We are grateful for these incredible individuals who offer us hope and joy in our own lives as they inspire us with their extraordinary stories of survival and triumph.”

Moses isn’t quite sure why she survived while so many others imprisoned with her at Bergen-Belsen did not.

“That was where they sent everybody to die,” she said.

Moses was barely clinging to life herself when British troops arrived to liberate the concentration camp, where 37,000 died in captivity and 13,000 more from illness and disease soon after their release, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, a compilation of the research and writing of dozens of well-respected historians.

“I remember, they burst into the camp with guns, and we thought the Germans were finally coming to kill us all, to finish us off,” she said. “Everyone was praying, because we all thought, ‘This is the end.’

“But then it was a pleasant surprise. They didn’t kill us; they were kind. They helped us.”

Moses was taken to a hospital at a nearby camp for displaced persons, established in military-school barracks that had previously served as living quarters for Nazi troops.

She was hospitalized for several weeks, maybe even months, recovering from malnutrition, typhus and other maladies. Her muscles, she said, had become so deteriorated that she couldn’t walk.

When she was finally released from the hospital, able to walk again and rejoin an estimated 12,000 other survivors from Bergen-Belsen and other concentration camps, Moses remembers how shocked they were to see her.

“The children and the old people, they were the first to be killed, because they were of no use to the Nazis,” she said. “When the other survivors heard about me, this little girl who survived Bergen-Belsen, which was unheard of, they were pushing and shoving. They all wanted to see me.”

Moses’ name was placed on a list of Holocaust survivors, and she was eventually reunited with her father.

“That was one of the best days of my life,” she said. “Somebody hollered to me and said my father was there, and I couldn’t believe it. I saw him standing there, and I looked up at him, and he was bony, he was skinny. We hugged and kissed and cried.”

Moses, an only child, was living with her mother and father in Piotrkow Trybunalski, a ghetto the Nazis established while rounding up the Jews shortly after they invaded Poland in 1939. As soldiers started gathering the women and children to send them off to death camps, her father put her in hiding with the family of a Christian friend. Her mother was put on a train to Treblinka, where she was murdered in a gas chamber.

Moses was eventually discovered and sent off at the age of 5 or 6 with her mother’s half-sister to a concentration camp for women at Ravensbruk. A female guard there told Moses that her blond hair, blue eyes and features reminded her of the German daughter she had to leave behind when she was conscripted to serve.

“She would sneak me a little bit of food whenever she could,” Moses said. “I think that gave me the strength to survive the horrors I would face.”

Starvation of prisoners, especially those too young or frail to work in labor camps, was a deliberate tactic the Nazis used as part of their plan to eradicate the entire Jewish race through genocide, according to the Nobel Peace Center.

Moses remembers hunger pangs during her imprisonment at Bergen-Belsen that were so strong she picked up a dirty rag on a floor, hoping it would provide nourishment, and nearly choked to death trying to eat it.

“People have no idea what it is, not just to be hungry, but to feel the gnawing in your stomach and gut,” she said.

“Usually, when I finish my talks at schools, churches, colleges, other groups, people ask questions. One of the most common is: ‘What was the most exciting thing you discovered after you were liberated?’ I tell them there were three things — food, food and food.”

After they were reunited, Moses and her father stayed in the displaced persons camp for a while but eventually came to the United States in 1949 to make new life for themselves, she said. They settled in St. Louis.

Moses grew up, married an Air Force serviceman and lived in several different states and countries as he was moved from base to base throughout his career. They were married for 16 years and had four children together, a girl and three boys — each born about a year after the other, she said.

She moved to Denver about seven years ago and shares her story of survival often, at schools, churches and colleges throughout Colorado.

“I speak today, so the lessons learned from one of the biggest genocides in human history will not be forgotten. If we forget our past, if we don’t learn from it, we’re bound to relive it. I speak so we don’t relive our past.”

Moses returned to Germany about 20 years ago to visit “the death camp, Bergen-Belsen” for the first time since the 1940s. It’s a memorial now, she said, that draws hundreds of visitors each day.

“I was walking amongst the tourists, looking at the pictures of the skeletal people, thinking to myself ‘If these tourists only knew that here, walking among them, was one of those skeletons.’ Then I went to the mass grave, where hundreds were buried in each grave. I stood at the grave, with the dead bodies underneath me in the earth.

“I very well could have been one of those bodies and skeletons, but I was standing above them, alive and well.”

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, twitter.com/KellyLyell or facebook.com/KellyLyell.news. 

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Holocaust survivor to share story at CSU that Anne Frank didn't live to tell