Page 34 - Witness

I Have Found My Parents’ Grave
Anna Heilman was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the death camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz. Along with her sister, Ester Wajcblum, she helped smuggle the gunpowder into Auschwitz-Birkenau used to destroy Crematorium No. 4. Ester was executed less than two weeks before the evacuation of Auschwitz and barely three weeks before its liberation.
After her first trip back to Poland since the end of World War II, Anna wrote to the 40 students who had accompanied her, saying:
“...we came to the collective grave of the ashes, a round mound of ashes that were carefully scooped to rest in one place under a protective dome of gray stone. What I felt there was relief. I have found my parents’ grave. I told the students, but I suddenly felt that it was not me talking, that I was surrounded by thousands of faces, smiling at me, pushing me, talking to the students through my voice, saying: ‘Tell them and thank them for coming here for remembering us and for never forgetting.’”
Anna Heilman dedicates plaque in sister’s memory Auschwitz, 1994
March of the Living.
The mausoleum at Majdanek was erected in 1969 and contains ashes and remains of cremated victims that had been collected into a mound after the liberation of the camp by the Soviet Army in 1944.
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