Holocaust survivor Miriam Linial celebrates 100th birthday with friends

Holocaust survivor Miriam Linial celebrated her 100th birthday, with cakes flowers, friends, wishing to tell her life story to those willing to hear it.

Linial was born in the town of Kozminek in Poland in 1921 to a family of nine, with two parents, seven siblings, and one grandmother.  

Synagogues in her area were closed down.

This later led to the creation of the ghetto near her town, at which point she saw many Jews being sent to their deaths, though she was unaware at the time believing they were sent to another ghetto until further denial was impossible.

"We did not know what a day would bring. It was a difficult and unbearable time in the ghetto and every day we saw people being sent to die 'like lambs to the slaughter.' "

"I remember at first we did not believe that people were sent to die. We only thought that they would be transferred to another ghetto or to work in the field. Slowly the token fell.

In 1940, her life mostly consisted of waking up early in the morning for forced labor and return to the ghetto during the night, with a shortage of supplies which meant many nights were spent hungry.

"Every day the Germans searched for the next victims in the ghetto. Each time the list lengthened and the ghetto emptied. I stayed with my parents until Auschwitz, where they also perished. I cried for days, and we still did not understand that Auschwitz was a death camp."

At that point, the Nazis began to take people onto buses which they filled with poison gas, first the elderly, where Linial lost her grandmother followed by her little sister, who was five years old when she died.

"We did not even get to say goodbye to them," recalled Linial.

After that, Linial remembered, "children aged from 11 to 14 were put into these 'death' buses, including my brother."

At the end of the war, the remaining members of her family were her and three of her brothers. 

"We were alone in the world, with no profession, home, parents, or guidance. We moved from ghetto to ghetto."

"I worked in the kitchen of one of the factories in the ghetto," she continued, and "one day, two Jews came across a huge pot containing boiling soup that fell out of their hands by mistake" 

"I slipped into the soup, and my whole body was burnt, which caused me an extended hospitalization. When I was released from the hospital, the war ended."

After the end of the war, she remembered, "my brothers and I decided that the exile was enough and that a state should be demanded of the Jewish people."

Without any hesitation in 1946, Miriam and her brothers immigrated to Israel. She was 24 then. 

"We could have lived in any other country in Europe but after the atrocities we went through, and after the damned European soil murdered all my family, I decided would not be home there ever again."

Miriam remembered that the beginning of her life in Israel was difficult, especially the first years but, as she said, she and her brothers did everything they had to do with joy and happiness.