To Obey or Not Obey with Holocaust Survivor Vera Sharav: Part II

Vera Sharav is a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection. She’s spent decades advocating for ethical medical standards and individual rights. Known for her outspoken views on public health, Vera has been deemed controversial for comparing the Holocaust with the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, she continues to bravely highlight dangerous parallels, emphasizing the importance of personal conscience in the face of tyranny.

You can watch the full interview on YouTube.

In this Part 2 of 5, Vera shares her childhood experience of surviving the Holocaust. Deported to a concentration camp at age 3, she recounts the suffering, loss, and fear she endured. Vera reflects on the moral challenges she faced and how they shaped her understanding of human rights, especially in our current tyrannical age.

MA: In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the Holocaust. You know this subject intimately. Could you tell us your story?

VS: I was a little child, only three and a half, when we were deported from Romania to a concentration camp in Mogilev, Ukraine. One of the problems with Eastern Europe then was that the borders constantly changed. What’s now Ukraine might have been called something else back then. People would joke that you’d wake up under one flag and by dinner, be under another. Mogilev wasn’t a death camp, but we were left to starve. Jews were constantly accused of spreading disease, but with no sanitation, no food, and freezing conditions, diseases like typhus spread easily. My father died of typhus, about half a year to a year after we arrived.

MA: I’m so sorry. That must have been a very traumatic experience. How long were you in the camp, and how did you leave?

VS: I was in the camp for three years, so I was six and a half when I left. I left because my mother managed to get me a list of orphans who were to be rescued in 1944. At the very end of the war, it was clear that the Nazis were going to murder everyone who was still alive in the camps. There was some kind of deal made, a sort of bartering, to rescue a couple thousand orphan Jewish children.

The final destination was eventually Palestine. My mother lied and said I was an orphan because the deal was only for orphans. I wasn’t technically an orphan, but she lied to save my life. After that, I had an odyssey for about eight months where I was alone.

MA: Can you describe your journey?

VS: We left the camp on the same cattle trains that took Jews to Auschwitz and the extermination camps. Because we were children, they let us out once to relieve ourselves, which they didn’t do for those who were shipped to the death camps. One of the older children, maybe 18 or 19, found a baby in a ditch and clung to it. When she wouldn’t let go of the baby, soldiers beat her off the train.

I watched in horror. I knew that both would die—by either being shot or left in the cold.

It was winter and I felt so guilty because I knew I couldn’t do what that brave person did. I wanted to live. I also felt guilty when my father died. I was only three and a half and blamed myself. You see, on the way to the camp, our boat was overcrowded, and my father threw his winter coat into the water to prevent it from capsizing.

But I held onto my little coat and a teddy bear. When he died, I was certain it was because he didn’t have his coat, and I was the selfish little girl who kept hers. So the scene of this 18-year-old risking her life for someone else’s baby horrified me. Once again, I felt guilty, because I knew it was the right thing to do, yet I also knew that I would not voluntarily risk my life for someone else. 

MA: You mentioned being on your own for about eight months. What happened during that time in Romania?

VS: During those eight months, the authorities gave a false reason for bringing us children back to Romania, claiming that we shouldn't have been deported in the first place. It made no sense, but that was their excuse. I was with a group of children, but I didn’t like it. I was an only child and used to being around only adults. I knew I couldn't fully take care of myself, but I also knew I couldn't rely on the other children either. I had to think for myself throughout the ordeal. What I learned during that time was how to assess people, determine who I could trust—including Gentiles who gave me shelter and were kind. I was able to discern kind people. I chose well. I was never abused.

MA: How did this terrible experience shape your outlook?

VS: It shaped me a lot. When the COVID plandemic was launched, I was deeply upset about the masks and how children couldn’t see what people looked like or what their emotional expressions were. Everything is done for a reason, not by chance, and part of that was conditioning children to be afraid of everyone rather than to assess whom they could trust.

I felt strongly about forced masking because during that time alone I judged people by their faces, especially by looking at them and reading their intention. I remember being very sick at one point. A man, maybe from the Red Cross, saw me crying at the school where we were, and he took me home.

He and his wife nursed me back to health. I stayed with them for three months. They were Christian, and I remember it was Easter, also my birthday, and they let me play with Ukrainian and Russian Easter eggs, which are very different from the pastel ones used in the West. These had bold black and red designs, like their embroidery.

MA: How did you eventually reconnect with your family?

VS: One thing my mother did before we were separated was sew the names and addresses of everyone she knew into the seams of my coat. This was so that wherever I ended up, there might be a chance someone would know us. Eventually, we located my mother’s brother, who was a banker in Bucharest. In Romania, if you had money, you could buy your exemption from being deported.

My father had all his assets invested in forests. He was in the lumber business. He lacked cash, so he couldn’t bribe an official to evade deportation. My uncle, though, had the necessary cash. He sent a chauffeur to pick me up. I ended up in a limousine with two Nazi soldiers and the Romanian driver and had to pretend that I was a little Romanian girl going back to Bucharest after a visit to my aunt. I don’t know how I managed it, but I did, probably because I spoke both Romanian and German. (German was actually my mother tongue, as many assimilated Jews in the cities that had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, continued to favor German.)

MA: After leaving Romania, what was your experience like with your uncle and the journey to Palestine?

VS: When I finally reached my uncle, it was like arriving at a palace. It was hard to process such a drastic change. My mother’s brother, his wife and his son, who was three years older than me, lived in luxury. I stayed for about three months here before heading to Palestine. Looking back, it felt like being moved around, much like a parcel post package—transferred from one temporary residence to another. I was eventually put on a train to the port city of Constanza to board a boat. I befriended a family of adults during the journey.

When we arrived at the port, three small boats were docked. Each of us was assigned to one of the boats. I was to be put on the boat with all the other children. But I absolutely refused. No matter what they tried—even bribing me—they couldn’t convince me to board the boat I was assigned to.  From their point of view, I must have seemed like a child having a tantrum, but I wouldn’t budge. Miraculously, they gave in, and I went on the boat with the family I befriended and trusted to take care of me.

MA: What happened next?

VS: I was knocked out because I get very seasick, so I didn’t see what occurred, but I heard about it the next morning. A Nazi submarine torpedoed the boat with all the children—there were no survivors. I never said a word about it to anyone, but I thought to myself I was right not to get on that boat.

Once again, I felt guilty, though I was glad to be alive. Our boat headed to Istanbul, Turkey, and from there, we boarded a train to Palestine. The train journey itself was interesting because that route was rarely used—only for about three weeks in all its existence could a train actually travel from Istanbul through Syria and Lebanon. I remember the journey because it followed the Mediterranean Sea.

MA: What was life like when you arrived in Palestine?

VS: When I got to Palestine, they found my mother’s sister through the list of contacts my mother had given me. My aunt, uncle and two sons lived on a family farm, and I stayed with them for three years. That was the only time I had a happy childhood. They had chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys. I felt like a little shepherd. We also had cows, an orchard with citrus fruit, and a vegetable garden—it was paradise. Life in Palestine was simple back then; nobody was rich or terribly poor. My mother didn’t want to join me in Palestine because she knew war was coming, and she didn’t want to experience another war. So she came to New York. I left Palestine in late December 1947, just before the war broke out.

MA: The Holocaust undeniably left lasting impressions on you. Can you talk about how it affected you, especially the fear you felt?

VS: Fear was my personal connection to the Holocaust. People don’t understand how I can remember so much, but I do—especially the fear. After my father died, I was always afraid and constantly worried about my mother. If she had died, I would have been sent to the orphanage where children looked like skeletons. I used to hide whenever I saw them.

Everyone in the camps lived in constant fear, even though they weren’t death camps. Mainly men were taken for slave labor, and while some returned, many didn’t. The threat of death was always present, even without gas chambers in most camps. People don’t realize that slave labor was a major economic bonanza for corporations—not just the Nazi War Machine. Multi-national companies exploited the available slave laborers at the camps to work for nothing. They didn’t have to keep them alive—as trains continued to deposit new bodies.

MA: It sounds like much of the history we know about this period has been sanitized. What are your thoughts on that?

VS: Yes, a lot of the history has been cleaned up. The horror is much broader than just the extermination camps. They exterminated those they couldn’t use for labor, but many were worked to death. Now, at this point in my life, I feel like I’m part of an endangered species because Holocaust survivors are dying every day. I feel a deep responsibility to the victims who didn’t survive. They wanted the world to know what happened, how it happened, and who the perpetrators and facilitators were—so that it wouldn’t happen again. But the world didn’t want to know then, and even now, they still can’t fully accept the truth or heed the vital lessons. Sadly, the world is on the wrong track, headed toward a global Holocaust—unless people stop the warmongers.

Stay tuned next week for Part 3 of my discussion with Vera Sharav.