CBS News) Seventy years ago today — October 6, 1943 — a group of rabbis and Jewish war veterans staged a small march in Washington to draw public attention to the Holocaust then taking place across Nazi-occupied Europe. We are still learning more about just what happened, both from archives and from the personal witness of those who somehow survived. Our Cover Story is reported now by Lee Cowan:
She remembers it vividly: “The train arrives, people getting out, lining up on the platform, and pretty soon they will be told, ‘Men to one side and women to the other.”
To talk with Irene Weiss is to touch the Holocaust in a truly personal way.
She’s a survivor, and yet — some seven decades later — she can barely believe it had actually happened.
“At first, this was pretty hard to talk about, wasn’t it?” Cowan asked.
“Yes. It was extremely difficult. And then I realized that we have to share the story. We can’t let people forget it.”
She was just 13 when the boxcar carrying her and her family arrived at Auschwitz on that all-too-busy platform.
Weiss knew little of what would come of her when the doors of the cattle car opened: “They were barking orders to get out. My father and 16-year-old brother lined up with the other men and boys, and the women and children and elderly in another line.”