Abraham and Judith Stine

(Survivors)

Abe and Judith Süss Stine were both in their teens when taken from their homes in Poland and sent to concentration camps. Judith survived three years of forced labor at Auschwitz and lost all of her family except for one sister. Abraham was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in 1945, having escaped a last-minute massacre by hiding in a pile of dead bodies. He returned briefly to Poland but then went back to Germany, where he met Judith. They were married in 1946 and had a son, and then emigrated to Israel for a time. They came to the United States via Germany, and Abraham worked in the scrap metal business in Dayton for many years. Judith has now passed away and Abraham lives in Florida.

According to their son, Dr. David Stine, they were unable for many years to tell their friends and family about their experiences in the Holocaust.

Auschwitz, with its sister camp Birkenau, was the largest of all the death camps. Located in southern Poland not far from the Czech border, it housed several million prisoners between its founding in June 1940 and its liberation in April 1945. Hundreds of thousands died in its gas chambers, and the total death count is about 1.6 million. It was also notorious for Joseph Mengele’s medical experiments and other research with chemical weapons. Factories operating with slave labor surrounded the camps. Bergen-Belsen, another major death camp, is south of Hamburg. About 50,000 Jews were exterminated there.