Ewa Vogel

Lubaczów Ghetto

Her father lifted her to the train window and said, "You run. I know you will stay alive." She jumped. Her siblings were shot dead beside her. She was the only one in her family who survived.

On January 4, 1943, in the Lubaczów ghetto in occupied Poland, the Gestapo began their final liquidation. Seventeen-year-old Eva Vogel and her family—her parents and seven younger siblings—were herded with hundreds of other Jews into cattle cars. They knew exactly where they were going.

A boy from their town of Oleszyce had escaped from Belzec and returned to warn them: Belzec wasn't a work camp. It was a death camp. Pure extermination. Gas chambers disguised as showers. Crematoriums that ran day and night. Notes thrown from passing trains confirmed it: "Don't take anything with you, just water."

There would be no work. No survival. Only death. The cattle car was suffocating. Eighty people crammed into a space meant for livestock. No room to sit. Small windows covered with barbed wire. Children crying. Parents trying desperately to stay together.

Eva stood with her family, knowing this was the end. Then, a young boy on the train began tearing at the barbed wire covering the window. The wire came loose. Immediately, young people started jumping. The SS guards on the roof of the train opened fire with rifles, shooting at the bodies falling into the snow. Many jumped. Most were killed.

Eva's father, Israel Vogel, looked at his three oldest children: Eva (17), Hannah (16), and Berele (15). He made an impossible decision. You the oldest three—try. Maybe somebody will survive," he told them. "We will stay here with the small children, because even if they go out, they won't be able to survive."

He looked at Eva and said something she would carry for the rest of her life: "You run. I know you will stay alive."

Berele jumped first. Then Hannah. Then Eva. As she fell through the air, gunfire erupted. The SS guards on the roof fired repeatedly at the escaping prisoners. Eva landed hard in a deep snowbank. The impact knocked the breath from her lungs, but the snow cushioned her fall. Bullets tore through the air around her. She lay still, buried in snow, as the shooting continued. The train rumbled past, its wheels screeching on frozen tracks. And then, silence.

When Eva could no longer hear the train, she crawled out of the snow. The first thing she did: ripped off her yellow star. She vowed never to wear it again. Then she went looking for her brother and sister.

She found them dead in the snow. Shot. Their bodies sprawled among many others—corpses scattered along the train tracks, young people who had tried to escape but didn't make it. Of the many who jumped from that train, only two people survived. Eva Vogel was one of them.

Alone, freezing, traumatized, Eva walked back to Oleszyce—the town where she'd grown up. She went to the home of Polish farmers her family had once helped, people they'd entrusted with belongings before being sent to the ghetto. She knocked on their door, desperate.

They were terrified to see her. Not because they were cruel, Eva later said, but because they were afraid. Hiding a Jew meant death—for them and their entire family. They gave her bread and a little money. That night, they sent her away.

One Polish woman took pity on her. The woman's young daughter had recently died. She gave Eva the girl's passport—a Catholic identity card with the name "Katarina." With that false identity, Eva became someone else. She buried Eva Vogel. She became Katarina.

She moved constantly, terrified of being recognized. She stayed in train stations, always surrounded by people but utterly alone.

At a farmer's market in Kraków, she was caught in a roundup of workers. She was sent to Austria—to the Sudetenland, on the German-Czechoslovakian border—to work on a farm.

For the rest of the war, Eva lived as "Katarina," a Polish Catholic farm worker. She woke at 5 a.m. to milk cows. She worked in the fields until dark. During the day, she had no time to think.

But at night, the nightmares came. "I was afraid to sleep," she later said. "I dreamed about my family and my friends. I had horrible nightmares: I dreamed I saw my whole family with the Germans running after us. I hid but I could not escape from them." She dreamed of her brother and sister falling from the train, their bodies in the snow. She woke shaking in cold sweat.

And she prayed. "If I survive," she promised God, "I will return to the religion of my parents. I will observe." That promise kept her alive.

One day, she passed a group of Jewish prisoners working on the farm under SS guard. She wanted desperately to speak to them, to hear Yiddish, to connect with someone from her world. But she stayed silent. If she spoke, if she revealed any emotion, she would be discovered. So, she kept her head down and survived.

When the war ended in 1945, Eva returned briefly to Poland. There was nothing left. No family. No home. No community. Everyone she loved was dead. Her parents, her seven siblings—all murdered in the gas chambers at Belzec.

Eva immigrated to the United States. She settled in New Orleans and married Henry Galler, another Holocaust survivor.

For years, Eva didn't want to talk about the war. But eventually, she and Henry realized they had a responsibility. If they didn't tell their stories, who would? They began speaking at schools. Middle schools. High schools. Anywhere students would listen. Over the course of their lives, Eva and Henry Galler spoke to more than 600,000 students about the Holocaust, about tolerance, about the dangers of hatred and racism.

In 1985, at age 61, Eva graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of New Orleans. She never stopped learning. Never stopped teaching.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Eva and Henry's home was destroyed by toxic mold. They moved to Dallas, Texas.

On January 5, 2006—just four days after her 82nd birthday—Eva Galler died. But her voice lives on.

Eva Vogel had jumped into a snowbank while bullets flew around her. Her brother and sister were shot dead beside her. Her parents and younger siblings were gassed at Belzec. Of her entire family—parents, seven siblings—only Eva survived.

She spent the rest of the war hiding in plain sight, milking cows on an Austrian farm, carrying the weight of loss and the burden of survival. And then she spent the rest of her life making sure the world would never forget. Six hundred thousand students heard her story. This is one of them now hearing it again.