Jen

Jen Murphy

Hello, my name is Betty Grebenschikoff and I am a survivor of the Holocaust. In the beginning we would get out of school, and people would throw stones at us and call us dirty Jews. I couldn’t understand why they did this and I would go home to cry to my mother, but all she could say was, “we have to be careful because we are Jews.” This was the first time I realized that being Jewish meant to be something different, something bad in the eyes of Germany.We were lucky enough to go to Shanghai with about 20,000 other Jews because we weren’t required to have papers. All we needed was a ticket on one of the ships and to get away from the Germans without any problems. My father had a slight problem because he was supposed to meet with the Gestapo before we left. He was terrified that the Germans would catch up with us, because had they caught him, we would have never made it out of Berlin. After 30 days we finally landed in Shanghai, which was a complete culture shock. We landed in the slums where there was disease and there were beggars everywhere. It was very different than our sanitary home in Germany that we were used to. While we were there, we would go to schools that were built by Americans and Shanghai Jews who helped build homes and raise money for those who had nowhere to live. All the teachers spoke English and all the children spoke German so it was very difficult for us to communicate with each other. So what we did was sing English songs like “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean” and “Old Susanna”. We sang loud and cheerfully even though we didn’t know what we were singing, and that is how we learned English in no time.Shanghai didn’t know what to do with all of us Jew refugees, so a German Gestapo came and tried to persuade the Japanese to gas us or send us down the river in a boat just to sink us in the sea. Luckily, the Japanese weren’t quite ready to take that step so our lives were spared. Instead they put us in a small ghetto area where we all had to live together in a squashed environment. This is where we stayed until the end of the war.



This is Bob Wieland's story of surviving the Vietnam war and losing his legs. He is a well known motivational speaker throughout the US. media type="file" key="The_Arrival.mp3" width="240" height="20"