Omar

Joseph Heinrich

My name is Joseph Heinrich. I remember the fall of 1938, Jewish buildings were burned down, and police officers broke into our house and destroyed our possessions. We were scared; it was like nothing we’d ever seen before. We fled to our Aunt’s home in hopes of avoiding the police. The police came to our Aunt’s home, they asked for my uncle. My father wouldn’t let him go alone, so the police took him too. All of the children were sent to Holland, I went with my brother and sister. When we arrived at the border, we were immediately separated from any Germans and told that there was neither water nor toilets. It took us a day before we were allowed to leave the border, we were sent on another train, the Reingold Express, which took us all the way to Holland. When we arrived, we were greeted by journalist and the press. They asked us what the situation was like in Germany. We told them what we had heard, that there had been burnings and how the Jews had been arrested. I was never afraid, but I was changed forever. It was like a bell ringing, it couldn’t be un-rung. Something had changed that could never be fixed. They told us to write, so we did. Through letters, we found out our father had been put into Buchenwald, but was given an affidavit with help from a cousin. My mother encouraged father to go, probably for our sake. I never saw her again. Father managed to cross the border on the last train over. However, since he was a German the English arrested him and put him in a concentration camp with Nazis. We were all put into a special home, where we were taught separately from the Dutch children. I met a teacher named Mirjam, she became like an older sister to me, and her mother acted as if I was her son. In 1939, we were all separated my brother and sister were sent to Dutch families, and I was sent to an orphanage. As war broke out, I was moved back to Mirjam’s neighborhood. We were had been ordered to be sent to a concentration camp, but the leader of our youth group hid us instead, with only a few days to prepare. I spent a good amount of time underground where I reunited with my brother, my sister stayed safe with the family she was in. We escaped to Spain, where we stayed for a few years. I was eventually sent to Palestine, which is where my journey ended.

This is the story about my mom, Denise Corona, who survived the World Series Earthquake in 1989. She had been working at an office at the time during this major earthquake. It ranked a 7.1 on the richter scale. media type="file" key="Podcast.mp3" width="240" height="20"