Obligation
ging up graves and removing gold teeth from corpses.
Eventually, he was placed in three other camps, including Aushwitz, where Ebner inexplicably avoided the gas chamber.
He was marched out of the death camp as the war ended, escaping when he hid in a barn, burrowing deep into a pile of hay. He was free for the first time in four years.
Ebner came to America searching for family and found a distant cousin living in Springfield, Ohio. He moved to Columbus in 1948, married, had three children and began Ebner Properties, a propertymanagement company.
During an interview at a Holocaust exhibit honoring him at Jewish Family Services, 1070 College Ave. in Bexley, Ebner pulled up his left sleeve to show where his concentration camp tattoo had been before he had it removed.
But the number is burned in Ebner’s memory: “B2992,” he said quickly.
Sofiya Karpovich said that she believes she was spared from the death pit so she could recount her Holocaust
story for future generations. “It is not easy, but it is my mission, my obligation to do this. Never, never
again must this happen.”
the night to Fran Silberstein Greenberg’s home in occupied Paris and took her father away in his pajamas.
“It was so frightening. We were all crying. ...We never saw our father again.” She learned later that he died at Auschwitz on July 8, 1942.
It was the beginning of years of persecution, fear and hiding for the daughter of a Russian shoemaker and Polish dressmaker.
Now the sole breadwinner for the family, Jeanne Silberstein first put her girls in day care and later reluctantly sent them away to safer foster homes.
“If you were a Jew,” Greenberg recalled, “you had to wear a Star of David if you were over 6. We were the enemies. Everybody blamed us for starting the war. They would spit on us.”
Greenberg and her sister were called back to Paris to see their mother, who was gravely ill in the hospital. She died when Greenberg was 9 years old and is buried in a mass grave in Paris.
She recalled one of the last things her mother told her: “Someday you will be able to be a Jew again.”
Greenberg, who now lives in Grandview, said she remembers going to a bomb shelter when her city was under siege by the Allies.
“We could see the bombs dropping from the skies. We went to the bomb shelter and it was wall-to-wall people. My sister held me as the bombs fell.”
Greenberg made several stops in other homes before being sent to the United States to live with her sister’s family in Cannonsburg, Pa.
“I always felt like I was second class. Nobody wanted us. The war was over, but it wasn’t over for me.”
Eventually she met Dan Greenberg, married, and had three sons.
“It’s a miracle I survived,” the 82-year-old said. “I can’t say that God protected me. Why would he protect me and not everyone else? I have a hard time with God.”
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