SALEM — Holocaust survivor Kati Preston spoke Monday Salem Academy Charter School about being forced into hiding as a child and losing her father in a concentration camp.
The presentation to about 250 students was made possible through a teacher grant from the Salem Education Foundation. It gave students the opportunity to engage directly with history and gain a better understanding of the resilience and courage necessary to survive the horrors of the Holocaust.
Preston was 5 years old when she hid in Nazi-occupied Hungary after her father was taken and killed in a concentration camp.
Now living in New Hampshire, she continues to speak to both youth and adult audiences across New England to ensure that the lessons she learned about the importance of empathy and standing against injustice are shared.
“I want to talk about my experience because there are so many parts of it that relate to our country today,” Preston said. “It bothers me that in my lifetime, I can see such change. When I saw those Nazis marching in Virginia with tiki-torches screaming ‘kill the Jews,’ they were the same faces that I saw marching during my childhood.
“I tell this story almost as a warning to make sure that we don’t get into that same sort of situation from that moment in history.”
With a Jewish father who owned a wholesale fish business and a mother who was a dressmaker, Preston described her upbringing in the Transylvania region of Hungary as a “golden childhood,” prior to Nazi occupation.
Rather than an immediate shift to occupation, Preston emphasized that persecution began with a gradual shift towards Jews losing their freedoms.
“Occupation didn’t happen overnight, it happened by first taking away our freedoms,” she said. “Jews could no longer go to school, have a municipal job, go to cafes — everything was segregated. Dinners with neighbors turned so dark, people stopped talking when I came into the room, things began feeling very different and I could tell something was wrong — I just didn’t know what.”
Eventually, Preston’s family was moved to a recently built ghetto in a dilapidated area with a barbed wire fence surrounding it. This was the only place the 30,000 Jews in the area were permitted to congregate, with eight to nine people in rooms with no water, food, or electricity.
When Preston’s father was forced to leave and go into hiding in Romania, she believed he was only going on a business trip and would soon see him again. With her half-Jewish blood designating her by Nazis as “undesirable,” Preston’s mother was forced to hide her within their home and keep her a secret from neighbors.
“Suddenly there was noise in the streets, and I ran to the window to see soldiers dragging people out of their houses and herding them onto big trucks — kicking them and brutalizing them,” Preston said. “I was very scared, but I couldn’t stop looking.”
In order to secure her safety, Preston’s mother made the difficult decision to have a Christian friend take Preston away to the Hungarian countryside to ensure that Nazi soldiers would not discover her existence, ultimately saving her life.
For the first time in her life, Preston was completely alone in the dark, spending months hiding in the hay in a barn, still not believing that there were people searching for her to end her life.
After three months had passed, Nazi soldiers came to the farm following information that there was a Jewish girl being sheltered there. After beating and harassing the woman who brought her to the farm, soldiers entered the barn and began searching and tossing around hay.
“I made myself really small and held my breath, but my heart was beating so loud I was afraid they would hear something,” Preston said.
“Then a big black boot appeared right next to my head, and suddenly a bayonet came down an inch away from my face and got stuck in the wood. I always think of that as when my childhood ended — when I no longer was a little girl, but a hunted animal.”
Nazi soldiers would later arrest Preston’s mother and torture her when they found out she had a half-Jewish child, but she managed to keep her location a secret.
Around this time, Preston’s father left from Romania and managed to get just outside the ghetto where they were living, but was captured and sent to Auschwitz where he would later be tortured and killed.
When the war began and Preston was able to return to their apartment, she was initially happy to be home, but was forced to struggle through conditions with no food, water, or electricity, as well as constant air raids that forced her and her mother to constantly to hide in the cellar.
“I hope that none of you ever have to feel that kind of hunger — it’s enormous,” Preston said. “Your stomach hurts, your head hurts, your breath smells, and all you can think about is food.
“As a child, I couldn’t understand why my mother wasn’t making me food, so I kept asking her, which must have been very hard for her.”
Before the war ended, 28 members of Preston’s family had perished, including her father.
Learning about the deaths of her family and other Jews, Preston was filled with feelings of hatred and guilt, which took her decades to overcome.
“I wanted revenge, I wanted to kill someone, I was obsessed with death,” she said. “It took me 50 years to stop hating, only because I met so many kind people who restored my faith in humanity. Slowly, that poison left me. I see my religion now as love — it’s the only thing that does work against evil.”
Preston said that learning of her father’s death ended her girlhood and transformed her into a warrior, who fought for the rest of her life to use the opportunity she had felt so much guilt over receiving.
“I was a nasty little over-achiever,” Preston said. “I was a model, a fashion designer, and a journalist. But what I do now makes me happy, because I feel that this has meaning. If I can convince one of you to give up hate, I feel that I am very successful. That’s why I love doing this.”
With students asking about parallels between Nazi occupation and America today, Preston said that the next generation should use the tools and networks of communication that weren’t available when she was a child in order to ensure that persecution of that degree does not happen again.
“What is happening today is almost the Nazi playbook; banning books, arresting innocent people, and picking on minorities — all they want to do is turn everyone into good obedient workers,” she said. “But we are better off now, because we have a level of communication we didn’t have then, and are much more in tune with what’s going on.
“Reach out to people who are good, because the average American is a good person, even if they’re scared. Somehow, your generation is even more courageous than mine.”
Michael McHugh can be contacted at mmchugh@northofboston.com or at 781-799-5202