Friday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. A new installation at the United Nations on the East Side is moving visitors to tears. LisaRoznerTV met a Holocaust survivor there who recently shared her story with President Biden.
on the East Side is moving visitors to tears.Rutka Rakhel was the younger sister of Bronia Brandman. She was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp and is one of nearly 5 million Holocaust victims documented in"The Book of Names.
" The book is 26 feet wide, and 7 feet tall, and it has been installed by Yad Vashem -- the World Holocaust Remembrance Center -- in the U.N. visitors lobby. It is open to the public for the next three weeks. "It testifies to the fact that my parents were murdered. My siblings were murdered. My mother's 11 siblings and her family were murdered," Brandman said."My father's family were murdered and there are no graves. The Germans used the ashes."Queens Holocaust survivor recounts horrors of Kristallnacht, says she still experiences hate CBS2 saw a pre-war picture of Brandman's family in Poland. She and her older brother were the only ones who survived. Brandman didn't talk about it for 50 years, but last year sat down with President Biden for more than an hour in the Oval Office and was honored at the White House Hanukkah party. The 91-year-old Borough Park resident showed CBS2 the tattoo she received at Auschwitz when she was 12. The symbol below, she said, meant she was eligible for the gas chambers. "I was scheduled from dying from death several times," Brandman said."My two baby sisters, both of them very young, went to the gas chamber alone. I absorbed all of this. I felt do I have the right to live?" Among the more than 10,000 pages of names, each person has a story and they can be found by looking up their names on Yad Vashem's website. "It's so unbelievable that I actually found my grandfather's name," said Olga Rothman-Weitzman of Brookfield, Connecticut."My grandparents, my aunts and uncles were all killed in Treblinka, so to find their name in print is a validation that they lived."Rothman-Weitzman said her parents were the only survivors in her family. She was born in a displaced persons camp. "If you are looking, for instance, for Joseph Klein, you will find more than 200-250. When you go one by one, you can understand the dimensions of this tragedy," said Dr. Alexander Avram, the director of the Yad Vashem Hall of Names. As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, CBS2's Lisa Rozner searched through an entire page of people named Marton Fischer, her great-grandfather's name. She also found Ivan Laszlo Schwarzenfeld, her grandmother's nephew who was around 12 years old and listed as"murdered in an unstated place." "It certifies to the fact that 6 million people, innocent people, that breathed and dreamed were murdered. Why?" Brandman said."And you have to address the antisemitism which is rampant worldwide. I am afraid of this repeating itself."READ MORE"This can happen and can happen again": 93-year-old Holocaust survivor Edith Gross tireless in her mission to make sure the world never forgets Brandman added she hopes having the ability to touch the names will touch people's hearts, because it's everyone's responsibility to never allow this to happen again. At the end of The Book of Names, there are blank pages symbolizing more than 1 million identities of people who have not been named that were murdered. The installation is open to the public Monday through Friday. You don't need an appointment. You just need to check in at the visitor's center across the street from the U.N. on First Avenue near 45th Street.
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