Holocaust Survivor Testimony - Cassie Brasher

Brigitte Aldman was from Memel in the Baltic Coast. The first signs she saw after Hitler’s coming to power were that German girls at school no longer wanted to sit with Jewish girls and even teachers became unfriendly with them. Almans father built a big container for their family to live in to keep them safe, but it ended up being burnt down. Later her family missed the chance to move to Canada because her mom was sick and couldn’t make the trip, but they were safe for a while in the United Kingdoms. There they heard rumors of Jewish slave and death camps. Aldman and her family eventually were sent to a ghetto. She explained that even before the ghetto, Jews were forced to wear the Jewish star and not even allowed to walk on sidewalks. She described the ghetto having no sanitation. Usually a family would have one room to live in. They depended on strangers for a while until her dad found some attic space in a farm house they could use. All they had in there was a bed for her parents, a cot for Brigitte, and a sewing machine. Aldman remembered one day 10,000 people were taken and never seen again, and later everyone was supposed to be inspected by an SS officer. An SS Sargent chose whether people would continue to live or die. Aldman said, “He yielded enormous power despite the low rank that he carried…power over life and death.” They all passed and went to the living side, but a little while later her mother died. She had been sick and malnourished for a while. Aldman knew it was coming, “Every day we went to work we had to leave her at home not knowing whether we would find her or we would find her alive,” she said. Eventually Aldmans father got her a job as a maid in a German household. One day a lady asked where these Germans got their maid. They were worried that people would find out she was Jewish and take her so they moved to a farm far from the capital. This job as a maid allowed her to survive. Her only consequence of surviving that she talks about was losing her mother.