In Spokane, 97-year-old Holocaust survivor Helga Melmed remembers Auschwitz

When her number was called, a teenaged Helga Melmed’s head was shaved and stripped naked before the Auschwitz guards.

“We were taken to the showers, and we were certain that was the end of us – that we would die in those showers. We hugged each other, and we prayed, and we sang, and we prayed as we walked into the shower. But the shower was not gas. The shower was water,” she said.

The 97-year-old shared her story to hundreds of Spokanites Tuesday night. The Chabad of Spokane brought the survivor to the city to “challenge” those who “deny or distort history,” said Rabbi Yisroel Hahn.

Melmed started school in 1934 after Adolf Hitler was already in power. The 5-year-old Berlin student was beat until she bled by her teacher. The other students were told to call her “dirty Jew.” Her parents eventually pulled her out of public school.

Her Jewish school was burned down in 1938 during Kristallnacht – the infamous Night of Broken Glass where Jewish homes and businesses were torched by the Nazis.

“It was a horrible sight. They were screaming and they were destroying all the stores. And Jewish life changed completely. But life went on,” she said.

In 1941, German soldiers kidnapped Melmed and her parents. They were among thousands of Jews shoved into cattle cars that night and taken to a ghetto in Poland. There, her father was shot by German soldiers and her mother starved to death.

“My mother was getting sicker and sicker, and she would not eat. What was she doing? Was she giving her life for me? I think she was, and I still feel guilty about it,” she said.

On her 14th birthday, Melmed was given an onion by her mother as a present. Her mother was dead by the next morning.

“It was the best birthday present I ever had in all my life,” she said.

With both her parentsdead, Melmed was taken to the Auschwitz camp, where she waited to die herself.

“The stable we were put in was very close to the gas chamber, and we would see the smoke go up out of the chimney. First white, then black. It was also the smell of burning flesh that you can never forget. We smelled it, and we remember it very, very well,” she said.

When your number was called, you would be taken to the gas chamber. But Melmed was instead taken to a work camp in Hamburg. She only stayed in Auschwitz for two weeks.

At the end of the war, she was taken to a Swedish hospital where she stayed for the next year-and-a-half. She was 17 and weighed 46 pounds. She later immigrated to America to be with other surviving family and became a nurse.

“I hope that people not only hear my story, that they also listen to it and find the words between the lines. I want you to learn. I want you to learn a lot. Get educated, find out for yourselves of what is going on and what to do. Speak out when you know right from wrong. Because only with love and only with respect can you make a better world for all of us and for the next generations and the generations to come. We need a better world. So please listen to what’s going on and love and hope for a better world,” she told the audience.

Rabbi Hahn said Melmed’s story is more important than ever given rising antisemitism since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel that was “taken right from the Nazi playbook.”

“Back then, we were decimated. We didn’t have an army, we didn’t have an air force, we didn’t have power to back up that pledge. Today, we do have that power, and it’s not only our right to protect our families, it is our moral obligation,” he said. “The Greeks, the Romans, the Crusades, the Cossacks, the Nazis, the Bolsheviks, the names, spaces and places may change from century to century. But that insidious agenda has always been the same, to persecute and, if possible, annihilate the Jewish people. But it is God that has the final say.”