Victoria Stewart

Professor Tonya Wertz-Orbaugh

UWRIT 1103-011
January 25, 2016
Weekly Writing 2: Reva Kiborts Survivor Testimony
It is so easy to read about events like the Holocaust and recognize that what happened
was bad however, it strikes an emotional cord when you listen to a survivor share their story.
The Holocaust jumps from written pages in textbooks and becomes real. While I watched the
video for this assignment, I felt my stomach drop at the mention of all of the death Reva Kibort
was objected to at such a young age. Honestly, the small details that she remembered and shared
in her testimony were what stood out to me; from the little blue shoes that her father made for
passover to the songs she sang in the barracks.
I was surprised that when the Germans first arrived in Warsaw, Poland, many of the
residents there thought the soldiers were nice. Reva remembers standing in line for good soup
and bread, but little did she know that this would become routine when she was in a slave labor
camp. Only the soup of her future would not be as tasty, rather it would be a concoction
including cabbage or rutabaga and little white worms. Reva said that although it was
disgusting, there was no alternative because everyone was starving. The German soldiers began
depriving the Jews of food long before any of them were transported to the camps. In the ghetto,
Reva recalls her mother looking at her and saying, Go out and play. If you go out and play and
sing a song, youll forget you are hungry. I could not imagine how it must have felt to look at a
starving child, let alone your own offspring, and to have no way to help them.

While watching the video, I could not help but wonder why other non Jewish people did
not try to help save them. Reva and her sisters were fortunate enough to escape the ghetto at one
point by crawling under holes in the fence that surrounded the area. They sought refuge from an
old friend of their father, but by the end of the night he ended up coming at the with a hatchet
and yelling, Dirty Jews, get out! after drinking a bit too many alcoholic beverages. Even
worse, in my opinion, was during transport to a different camp when the train stopped for a
break. The doors were opened and the Jews were subjected to obscene comments being yelled at
them by non-Jewish people. I wonder if these people were fearful that they would face
repercussions by the German Nazis if they tried to help or if they were just so brainwashed by
the messages they were hearing that they did not care what happened to the Jews.
How could a person ignore all of the acts of brutality that were administered by the Nazi
soldiers? How could they ignore the death? I knew that the German Nazis did awful things to
demonstrate their supremacy and power to the Jews, but I was stunned by what Reva
remembered. The soldiers were quick to kill and had no tolerance for breaking rules, they hung a
man in front of a slave labor camp because they caught him trying to smuggle a little bit of food
back from working in the fields. He was left hanging for days as a reminder to the Jews. Reva
remembers when she arrived at the second concentration camp that she experienced. The men,
women, and children were all separated into groups and she was left holding a baby before being
told to throw it away. Reva was lucky enough to receive pity from a soldier who told her to run.
While she hid in a pile of dirty clothes, she watched all of the other children be shot by the same
man. I would like to think that I would have stood up for them and tried to help, but I guess you
do not really know what you would do in a situation unless you are actually in it.