Irene Weiss / Irene Fogel (F / Slovakia, 1930), Holocaust survivor

Irene Weiss / Irene Fogel (F / Slovakia, 1930), Holocaust survivor

• KEYWORDS : <Auschwitz> <Ravensbruck>

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Irene Weiss was born Iren Fogel on November 21, 1930, in Bótrágy, Czechoslovakia (now Batrad’, Ukraine) to Meyer and Leah Fogel. Meyer owned a lumber yard, and Leah managed their home and cared for Irene and her five siblings—Moshe, Edit, Reuven, Gershon, and Serena.

When Nazi Germany dismembered Czechoslovakia in 1939, Bótrágy, located in Subcarpathian Rus, came under Hungarian rule. Hungarian authorities banned Jews from attending school, confiscated Jewish businesses, and required thousands of Jewish men to be inducted into Hungarian forced labor brigades under military command. Among them was Irene’s father, Meyer, who was conscripted in 1942.

Six months later, Meyer returned home, only to find life more restrictive and harsh for Hungarian Jews. In April 1944 Hungarian authorities rounded up tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, including the Fogels, and crowded them into a ghetto in Munkács, a brick factory that was never intended to house people.

Hundreds of families were forced to live in overcrowded conditions. The only restroom was a latrine in the shape of a trench, which the inhabitants were made to dig outside. Shortly after their arrival, all girls under the age of 16 were forced to have their heads shaved. Irene’s mother gave her a scarf to wear around her bald head, which made Irene look older and probably helped save her life during a future selection at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Over a two-month period beginning in May 1944, nearly 425,000 Jews were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau, including Irene and her family. Irene was 13 years old. Upon arrival at the camp, her mother, three younger siblings, and older brother were killed.

SS authorities selected Irene and her sister Serena for forced labor, while their father was forced to work as a Sonderkommando, removing corpses from the gas chambers and cremating them. The SS camp staff periodically killed the members of the Sonderkommando and replaced them with persons from newly arriving transports. While still in the camp, Irene’s aunt learned through a boy from their hometown that when Meyer could no longer perform this work, the SS shot and killed him.

Irene, Serena, and two maternal aunts, Rose and Piri Mermelstein, worked in the “Canada” section of Birkenau—storage warehouses located near two crematoria—for eight months until January 1945, when the SS forcibly evacuated them on foot to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in central Germany. Three weeks later, the SS transported them to Neustadt-Glewe, a subcamp of Ravensbrück, east of Hamburg. There Piri became ill and was killed.

One day during morning roll call, the SS separated Serena and other prisoners from the group, deeming them too weak and emaciated to work. Irene said to a camp guard, “She is my sister,” and was then allowed to go with Serena. The sisters heard from other inmates that they would be sent back to Ravensbrück, where there were gas chambers. They were locked in a room with other prisoners to await the transport truck, but it never arrived.

As Soviet troops approached, the SS personnel fled, leaving the camp unguarded, and the prisoners gradually left. Irene, Serena, and Rose found temporary shelter in an empty house in a nearby town. Soon after, the three women made their way to Prague to look for relatives or other survivors.

In Prague they found an uncle, Joseph Mermelstein, who in 1938 had emigrated from his hometown to Palestine and returned as a soldier in the Czech Legion of the British Army. A few aunts and uncles survived, but Irene and Serena were the only surviving children from the family.

Irene, Serena, and Rose lived together with their surviving relatives in Teplice-Šanov in the Sudetenland. Irene attended a Czech school, Serena worked in a factory, and Rose remained at home, ill with tuberculosis. With the sponsorship of relatives and financial aid from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Irene, Serena, and Rose immigrated to New York in 1947.

Irene married Martin Weiss in 1949 and they moved to northern Virginia in 1953. She earned a bachelor of arts degree in education from American University and taught in the Fairfax County Public School system in Virginia for 13 years. Irene and Martin have three children and Irene is a volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

ABC News (27 January 2020)

Irene Weiss was 13 years old and living in Hungary with her family when they were sent to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944.

"They opened the train from the cattle car from the outside, and then they were yelling orders. First order is to leave thing behind and get out. And they kept repeating that, and with great urgency. 'Don't take anything. Leave everything behind and get out,'" she told ABC News.

At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where she now volunteers, there's a photograph of the day she arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau, right after she was separated from her 12-year-old sister, Edith, who was taken to the gas chambers.

Irene, though only a year older, had been selected for forced labor, she said, likely because she was wearing a kerchief on her head that made her looked much older.

Separated from her younger siblings and her parents, she caught up with another sister, Serena, who was three years older.

"Suddenly that whole idea that there'll be reunions, that whole thing suddenly flashed in front of me, and realized that-- that is not the way it is here," she said. "I suddenly realized that something very terrible happened to our family."

Eventually, she would also find two of her aunts, and the group was sent to work sorting through the belongings confiscated from the newly arrived prisoners.

"Just an electrified fence-- dividing us from-- crematorium and gas chamber number four. And we had the unfortunate experience to see groups of women, children, and elderly getting off the train, and entering the gate into that gas chamber," she said. "We suddenly realized what was happening. No one had to tell us anymore what-- what they were up to. Within a half-hour or so after … chimneys were belching fire and smoke,"

Her entire family was killed except her sister Serena and two aunts. Weiss was tattooed with the number A-6236.

When Weiss was sent on the death march in January 1945, the Nazis sought to put their Jewish prisoners into concentration camps deeper in Germany. Weiss spent five months in these camps with no food. Typhus broke out. She was waiting to be sent to the gas chambers when the Russian troops arrived and the Germans evacuated the camps. She said that even after the Russians liberated the camp, the soldiers did not help the prisoners, fearing being contaminated with typhus.

She said she had to hitchhike with her sister and a very sick aunt from village to village in hopes of finding a hospital. Thankfully, her aunt did survive.

She told Muir that she'd had the tattooed number removed but still has a scar.

"I couldn’t deal with the questions (about the tattoo)," she said. "It was one of those things that I could not answer. … You just don’t throw out answers about Auschwitz, just like that."

Weiss, 89, said the journey on Monday would be her third trip back to Auschwitz.