Sheindi Miller-Ehrenwald, a 90-year-old Israeli survivor of the Holocaust, has gone public for the first time with her diary documenting her deportation and incarceration in Auschwitz.
“She was 14 and wrote her diary in the concentration camp,” headlined Germany’s best-selling paper Bild on Wednesday. The newspaper wrote, “Today the 90-year-old shows her notes for the first time in Bild.”
Bild termed the release of the diary in its paper a “world exclusive.”
“I am now in a position to the tell the world my story,” Miller-Ehrenwald, who lives in Jerusalem, told the paper. Born in Hungary (today part of Slovakia), Miller-Ehrenwald was deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Her family members were murdered by the Germans in Auschwitz. She and her older sister survived the Shoah.
She said she “was amazed that she could write” the diary because it “was so dangerous there.” The diary is 54-pages and will be on display in the German Historical Museum in Berlin.
“I will die shortly and I don’t want the people to be forgotten who were murdered,” she said.
Miller-Ehrenwald stood across the infamous Auschwitz Dr. Josef Mengele. She described the deportation process where “The women must go to the right and men left,” and the theft of their possessions.
She chronicled how her parents, grandparents and brothers were transported in “cattle wagons.”
In a column that runs the length of the broad sheet paper, Julian Reichelt — Bild editor-in-chief — wrote, “What millions of Germans wanted to remain silent about, she [Miller-Ehrenwald] documented as a child. In her courage lives the truth.”
On Reichelt’s watch, Bild has gone to great lengths educate Germans about the Shoah and expose contemporary antisemitism.