Ilse Eichner Reiner, an artist who is now 93, was the featured speaker for the 58th Annual Community-wide Yom HaShoah (Day of Holocaust Remembrance) commemoration Sunday at the Greenwood Cemetery in Atlanta. The event was held at the “Memorial to the Six Million” monument to honor 6 million Jews killed.
It is never easy for Reiner to talk about the Holocaust. It can stir intense emotions and can take a toll on her body. She was only about 10 when her parents were taken away. Her father was killed at a death camp, and her mother was sent to a concentration camp where she contracted tuberculosis and died. Watch Reiner’s entire presentation here:
Credit: file
Credit: file
But Reiner believes it’s her responsibility to deliver a message of tolerance and respect, to not let history be forgotten.
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AJC reporters are always looking for good stories for our readers. In 2013, AJC journalist Helena Oliviero attended an event at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta to watch her daughter perform songs from a children’s opera. The piece, “Brundibar,” had special relevance for the center’s guest speaker that day. Ilse Reiner heard it performed as a child when she was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II in her native Czechoslovakia. Reiner was one of only a handful of children who survived the camp.
She now lives in Sandy Springs.
Oliviero approached Reiner about telling her story for Personal Journeys. Oliviero spent several hours with Reiner in her Sandy Springs home. To report the rest of her story, Oliviero traveled to the Czech Republic to interview other Holocaust survivors, see the concentration camp in which Reiner was held and visit the town from which she was taken.
Many of Reiner’s memories were too difficult for her to repeat. Recollections of her time at Auschwitz were culled from an interview Reiner gave in 1995 at the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a nonprofit founded by director Steven Spielberg, which has collected the oral histories of Holocaust survivors. The Bremen Museum also provided help with Oliviero’s research. Reiner’s diary, written in Czech, was later translated in English.
The Survivor, a two-part story published by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2013, was the first major telling of Reiner’s story in the United States. It’s a powerful tale of the resiliency of the human spirit.
Oliviero and Reiner kept in touch and became close friends.
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