Nobody realised I would never see my parents again
A Holocaust survivor tells Beth Abbit how she escaped the Nazi death camps thanks to the kindness of others
THOUGH she was too young to remember much, Anne Super knows her mother was crying, bags were being packed and a soldier ‘took up all the air in the room.’
Minutes later the family were forced from their home and rounded up with other Jews. Fearing their fate, her mother pushed her through a hedge into the arms of a local milkwoman who was waiting. She grabbed her, took her under her arm and ran.
Her parent’s decision, heartbreaking as it was, saved Anne’s life.
“It was just a moment, it was nothing else,” she says now, more than 80 years later. “Nobody realised that I would never see them again, that they would never see me again. We were just walking and she said ‘go!’ and I went.
“If they were able to think at all, there was no other decision to make. We were going to a death camp. Finished.”
The moment is imprinted in her mind. She remembers seeing lots of other people with suitcases and Germans with guns. But in truth, Anne was far too young to understand what was happening.
That moment, in 1941, was the last time she ever saw her parents. She knows they were taken to a concentration camp and murdered.
Anne was probably around three at the time, though she does not know her exact age and has only recently settled on a birthday. What she is certain of, is that the woman who grabbed her that night saved her life.
She is sure it must have been prearranged.
“She was standing there and she wasn’t just there to look because it was a horrible sight. These people were desperate. She grabbed me, she literally grabbed me and ran.”
But the milkwoman - a mother herself - was perhaps not the Good Samaritan you would imagine.
“She certainly saved my life, nobody can take that away from her,” says Anne. “But she didn’t like me.
“Her husband did. I remember being ill and he carried me around all night.”
Anne and her new carers would drink milk, eat potatoes and, ‘as a great treat’ radishes - something Anne still loves to this day.
“They had several children and therefore having me was another mouth. And believe me in those days another mouth was a curse,” she says. So I don’t blame her one bit for wanting to get rid of me. Having food at all was nothing short of miraculous in those days.”
Anne lived with this family as a hidden child ‘in the back of beyond’ on the Polish-Russian border. She believes she survived only because of her blonde hair and blue eyes.
But her time with this family was temporary. The milkwoman took the contents of her parents home as payment. And after around a year
she decided to could care for Anne no longer.
Finding a postcard from Anne’s aunt, the milkwoman asked a local scribe to write to her, threatening to put the child ‘out on the street’ unless she sent more money. Her aunt - who worked in a jam factory but was a Classics teacher knew a pupil whose father worked on the railways and had a travel pass.
“This incredibly brave man, who could have been killed for what he did, travelled all the way from the Russian border, picked me up and travelled on the top of the train,” Anne says.
“Can you imagine? With a three year old? Because inside the train belonged to the Germans.
“He put his life on the line for some child he didn’t know.”
From then on Anne lived with her aunt and cousin in Wlochy, a suburb of Warsaw, again hidden from the Germans. When the war ended, Anne developed tuberculosis and was sent to a sanatorium far from her family.
She said: “There was this sanatorium in which we were housed and there was another up the mountain and if you went there you didn’t come out alive. We knew that. If a child had lost weight they would scream all night. It was horrendous.
“But I did survive.”
During that time, Anne says she escaped by reading the Classics, Dickens and Shakespeare. She is still a voracious reader and says she first learnt English primarily because she wanted to read Shakespeare in the original language.
Throughout this time, Anne’s maternal uncle believed his entire family had perished during the war, but he put a message on Red Cross radio in a bid to find his niece. Incredibly someone heard it and told him she was alive.
“He was going to turn the world upside down to try and look for me,” she says.
She eventually travelled in 1948 with her aunt and cousin to be with her uncle in South Africa.
The trio travelled via Paris - a journey she remembers every minute of.
“It was so wonderful to go on a plane and then we got to stay in a hotel in Paris for a few weeks because the papers still weren’t quite right,” she says. “I saw girls with bows in their hair, I saw bananas for the first time - all sorts of things. And we went to the Louvre every morning. It was magical.”
On the flight down to Africa, she saw herds of elephants and giraffes and was welcomed by her uncle, his wife and their daughter in a huge Hudson car.
“We hadn’t seen anything like it” she says. “That’s when life began.”
It was at this point that she began to understand her Jewish identity with the help of a local family who took ‘a great interest’ in her.
“They were wonderful,” she says. “The father would spend hours talking to me about Judaism.
“I am the most irreligious Jew but with a very strong, powerful Jewish identity.”
It was at this time that Anne first met Maurice. They eventually married and had three children - Michael, John and Beth.
“There was not a moment’s doubt in his mind that I would make the perfect wife, who would make him the perfect children and we would have the perfect life. And we did. And I miss him,” she says.
The family moved to England in 1978. Maurice - a clinician specialising in cystic fibrosis - established a genetics department at Pendlebury Hospital, while Anne set up her own optician’s practice, in Cheetham Hill.
Maurice died 17 years ago, but it was he who encouraged Anne to tell her story
“I never said a word about it for years and the children knew nothing,” she says.
Now, she has written the story of her life with the help of Jewish social care charity The Fed, as part of the incredible My Voice project.
She has also given talks about her experience of the war years in an effort to further Holocaust education. And she currently features in a new photography exhibition at the Imperial War Museum North, which opens today.
Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors is a collection of 60 original contemporary portraits of survivors and their families.
Speaking about the importance of Holocaust education she says simply: “It must not be forgotten.”