Rochelle Dreeben: Escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto
Rochelle Dreeben was born on May 22, 1937 in Warsaw, Poland. When she was only three, World War II broke out. Around that time, Germany was bothered about losing in WWI. Historically, in January 1933, The Nazis, came into power in Germany. Hitler and The Nazis believed that they were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien
threat to the socalled
German racial community.Therefore, Hitler, who ruled at that time,
blamed the Jewish citizens of their lost, which led to the Holocaust in which the government persecuted and murdered more than six million Jews. When Rochelle was still young and
innocent, many of the people around her in Poland were captured and sent to the concentration camps. Her story was described how she survived the holocaust, harrowingly avoiding the
death camps.
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Life in Warsaw ghetto
Rochelle’s life changed dramatically when her family was forced out of their homes along with many other families into a certain area near a train track, which would make it easier for the
Nazis to move the Jewish population to the death camps. They were crammed and given far less in the amount of food they needed inside the ghettos which were enclosed by barbed wire fences or walls. Statistically speaking, almost 30% of the population of Warsaw was packed
into 2.4% of the city’s area. Due to this kind of treatment, typhus spread very quickly, which her grandfather had passed away in result of. Many others were executed if they were seen as sick,
especially children who were viewed as “useless eaters”.
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Escaping the ghetto
One day a woman came to the Ghetto looking for her nephew who was sadly already killed.
Dreeben said that the woman decided to save her and her mother with paperworks claiming that
they were Aryans (the race the Germans believed to have the “purest blood” of the people on Earth) paperwork she was planning to use to take her nephew and her child home. It was essential to have these false identity papers that were often gained through contacts with the
This book was written by Rochelle Dreeben about her experiences as a survivor of the Holocaust
antiNazi resistance. Here Dreeben had to separate from her father who decided to stay behind because going with them would bring them danger due to his non-Aryan looks. He decided to stay to fight in the ghetto uprising. Then one night, with the help of other people, her and her mother escaped the Warsaw ghetto.
Life after escaping
When Jewish children gained false identity papers to pass as “Aryans,” they were to be adopted by racially suitable German families. Rochelle, after escaping from the train with the help of the woman, went through the same process. As Rochelle’s mother felt that it was not safe for them to be together, so she took Rochelle to an orphanage where she could change her name and
hide her Jewish identity. She was adopted to a German family. With “racescientific” measure ofblond hair, blue eyes, or fair skin that merited the “opportunity” to be :Germanized, ” Rochelle was protected from the threat of Nazis to send majority of Jewish children to the “killing center.”
Later on in life, she found out that a lot of children at the convent were Jewish, and the women who ran it knew. Miraculously, Rochelle was able to meet her mother at the adopted house later
because her mother worked as an old maid. After their reunion, together they escaped to America. Later on in life she wrote a book called One Dark Night , about her experience as a Holocaust survivor.