Eyewitness to History: Holocaust Survivor Arye Ephrath

The Eyewitness to History video library was created to enable audiences everywhere to hear firsthand testimony from Holocaust survivors. This video was created from a live digital program, First Person: Conversations with Holocaust Survivors, recorded on November 16, 2022. It features Holocaust survivor Arye Ephrath, who was born in the Nazi German client state of Slovakia in 1942. His family avoided deportation for a number of years before going into hiding in Šišov, an isolated village in western Slovakia, in 1944. Arye spent the rest of the war hiding with a local shepherd and his family and pretending to be a girl to avoid suspicion, while his parents were hidden by a different family in a hole beneath a barn floor.
Learn more about Arye: www.ushmm.org/...

[@nz7921]

Fascinating! Thank you Mr. Ephrath for sharing your story with the world!

[@donnal.salmon998]

Arye is such a gracious and eloquent person. To have endured such horror and come out a better person is a beautiful testament to his family.

[@gj-po9oy]

Please take care of yourself, Baruch Hashem you are so young, you get to still tell the story for much longer to 120!

[@mountaingirl6479]

Thank you for sharing this special story! It is a testament to how his parents completed his raising, that he has a positive outlook on life, believes he will find goodness in most people. ❤

[@gj-po9oy]

I am so happy to hear how many resisted and fled. Would that my mother's father had found a place to hide. He was afraid they would attack his family. Apparently this is a common theme

[@gj-po9oy]

To Me Ephrath and Mr Benson and viewers, for a more complete understanding of the Slovakian Holocaust I recommend the classic book Cry Baby Cry written by a 12 year old girl who was old enough to have memory and knowledge of how the Slovak citizens collaborated with the racist laws against Jews in majority. Therefore the people who hid you were the exception and deserved much more credit for doing what they did with knowledge that most around them would report them even if they were fellow Catholics. The independent thinking of farmers in the remote villages led to higher percentage of hiding Jews and resisting in other ways according to historian data. Perhaps we could all learn more from these rare special people. Maybe we should think about crowd pressure influences and what it takes internally to resist them.

[@Spio101]

I’ve been wondering myself: This account is too good to be true, comparing with the other accounts I’ve listened to so far.

[@gj-po9oy]

Bardejov was a beautiful Jewish community and I believe nothing is left now.

[@margaretclarke3643]

Thank you for sharing your story. Unfortunately, and sadly, human kind never seems to learn from its history. Look at our current world; we are back in the days of Noah and getting worse every day. Our only hope is in the establishment of the Kingdom of God on this earth. May it come soon. Praise the Lord!

[@daivageeveerapen7337]

THE RIGHT TO SURVIVE A NORMAL LIFE OF A HUMAN BEING WAS TAKEN FROM MANY .YET YOU WERE SAVED TO COME AND TELL THE STORY. AND FOR THIS REASON I HOPE HISTORY WILL NOT BE REPEATED. WE LOOK FORWARD TO A PROGRESSIVE WORLD WHERE THERE IS " LOVE, UNITY AND PEACE."

[@gj-po9oy]

I believe it was called an exception, not an exemption.

[@gonefishing167]

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏👵🇦🇺

[@suzannakoizumi8605]

Thank God for the good Christians who obeyed Jesus Christ.