Portraits of Holocaust survivors at Berlin's Jewish Museum
Photographer Konrad Rufus Müller, known for his portraits of German chancellors, donated a collection of photos of Holocaust survivors to the museum. Each person has a unique story to tell.
Rachel Oschitzki
Rachel Oschitzki survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and a death march. In 1947, she boarded the Palestine-bound refugee ship, Exodus, which was involved in a scuffle with the British the military. After Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, she was one of the first to be allowed to emigrate to the newly established state. She returned to Germany in 1956.
Arik Brauer
As a teenager, Arik Brauer witnessed his homeland of Austria coming under the control of the Nazis. His father was murdered in a concentration camp. Arik, however, escaped from a transport vehicle and hid in a garden in the weeks before liberation by the Soviet Red Army. Later he became one of the main representatives of the Viennese School of Fantastic Realism art movement.
Manfred Rosenbaum
From his supposedly safe hiding place in the Netherlands, Rosenbaum was sent to the Westerbork transit camp at the age of 17. He survived the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, where many concentration camp prisoners were taken towards the end of the war. "There were no sleeping accommodations, it was a typhus epidemic, there was nothing to eat. People were dropping like flies."
Manfred Rosenbaum's parents
Manfred Rosenbaum's stepmother died in a gas chamber and his father passed away as a result of a death march. Rosenbaum himself survived and emigrated to Palestine in 1946. "I have every reason to hate the Germans. People talk about reparations, Germany pays billions. But there is no reparation for such a death industry."
Malwina Braun
Born in Krakow, Poland, in 1928, Malwina Braun lived with her family in the Nazi-designated Jewish ghetto for two years before being taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp and later to the Plaszow concentration camp. It was in a uniform factory in Plaszow that she met Oskar Schindler. "He was a very, very nice man. He got 1,200 people out who worked for him and whom he protected."
Eva Umlauf
Eva Umlauf was born in 1942 in the Novaky labor camp in what is now present-day Slovakia. As a two-year-old at the Auschwitz concentration camp, the number A-26959 was tattooed on her forearm. After being tattooed, she fainted in her mother's arms.
Eva Umlauf and her mother
This picture from around 1943-44 shows Eva Umlauf as a child with her mother. The picture was taken in the labor camp, where there was a photo workshop. There, scenes from camp life were documented in order to convey a positive image to the public, even when the inmates were facing death.
Rudolf Gelbard
"It's unbelievable what people can endure and what they get used to," Gelbard said of his horrific experiences in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. There, he was forced to open cardboard urns containing the ashes of murdered people and put them in the river to make them, as evidence of Nazi atrocities, disappear. He was a committed fighter against fascism until his death in 2018