‘I think she’s a hero’
Published: May 25, 2006
Renee Firestone pulled back her sleeve to reveal a faint tattoo, her prisoner ID number, A-12307.
It is a reminder of all she suffered in the concentration camp where she lost first her rights, then her possessions and finally, her family members.
Eighth-grader Harry Levenstein asked why never had it removed when Firestone shared her story at Mary Putnam Henck Intermediate School on Monday.
“Would you remove your ears?” she asked. “Of course you wouldn’t. They are part of you. This is part of me. That is why I will never have it removed.”
As she spoke, 420 eighth-grade students listened intently. Each spring for the past 13 years, Firestone has shared her story.
Her story has also been told in the Academy Award-winning 1998 documentary “The Last Days.” She plays herself in a movie to be released this summer, “The Freedom Writers.”
“We Holocaust survivors are dinosaurs,” she said Monday morning. “It won’t be long before none of us are around any more. As you can see, I am old lady. So listen to what I say, and remember it.”
Firestone recounted her early years growing up in Czechoslovakia. The daughter of a successful businessman, she and her family enjoyed the comforts of an upper-middle-class community. In the winter, she and her brother and sister skied and ice skated. In the summer, they played tennis and swam.
“My childhood was very much like yours is now,” she told the students. “It was a good life.”
Despite the rumblings of war, the Firestone family remained comfortable for several years.
“When I was 9 years old,” she said, “I heard of a new leader named Adolf Hitler. He was yelling on the radio that the Jewish people were responsible for all of the world’s problems.”
She overheard her parents say that it was unlikely that 1 percent of the world’s population could be responsible for all of its ills.
“As a child, I didn’t become alarmed about the war until the day my father came home from work, having been forced to give up his business. He was crying. And I remember thinking that if he couldn’t take care of himself, he wouldn’t be able to protect me.”
In 1942, Firestone and her family were instructed to prepare a suitcase so they could be relocated to work in factories to help the Nazi Third Reich. She naively packed favorite photographs, a warm coat, an extra pair of boots and a favorite swimsuit her father had given her.
She and her family were taken to the train station where they were loaded into a cattle car with 120 other Jews. Without food or water or even room to sit down, they rode for four days and three nights before arriving at Auschwitz-Dachau, the largest concentration camp in Europe.
“I decided to be the first one off of the train so that I could get a good job so I could help my family,” she recalled.
When she exited the train, she saw half-alive human skeletons dressed in black and white-striped pajamas walking around the grounds.
“It looked like a prison camp. So I wondered why we were there.”
Then 20 years old, Firestone took care of her 14-year-old sister, Klara, for six months, until Nazi soldiers took Klara to a medical facility for experimentation.
Vividly recalling the smell of the camp and the human ash spewing continuously out of tall smoke stacks, which covered the ground in gray, Firestone brought many students and teachers to tears.
“We were deprived of any real food and had access to water only once every three or four days,” she said. “When we were taken to the barracks, we had to decide whether to use our 10-minute time limit to rinse the lice off of our gown, drink water from the pipe or use the toilet.”
Working in a satellite camp, Liebaw, Firestone was liberated by Russian soldiers on May 8, 1945. She later discovered that her mother had been taken by truck to a crematorium immediately upon her arrival in Auschwitz. Her father worked in a death camp for years before eventually succumbing to tuberculosis. She ran into her brother after the war while searching for survivors at a Red Cross station.
After Firestone finished speaking on Monday, dozens of students rushed to get her autograph, ask questions and thank her for driving to Lake Arrowhead to share her experiences.
“I think she’s a hero and an inspiration,” said eighth-grader Krista Talbott. “Listening to her story made me upset. But I think we all need to be reminded about what happened.”
Another student, Shelly Matthews, agreed.
“It was very sad to hear. But she put it into perspective for us. The way she talked, you could picture her as a young person in that situation.”
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