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Died 5 January 2006, Dallas, Texas, United States Siblings Berele Galler, Hannah Galler | ||
Eva galler s holocaust story
Eva Galler (January 1, 1924 - January 5, 2006) was a Jewish holocaust survivor, born in Oleszyce, Poland. While being deported to the Belzac Extermination Camp, she escaped by jumping out the train window with her brother and sister. Her siblings were shot and killed as they ran, but Galler managed to escape by landing in a deep snowbank. She spent the rest of the war working on a farm in Germany and later moved to America. In her later life, she traveled to schools to speak to students about her story.
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Holocaust eva galler
Biography
Eva Galler (née Vogel) was born on January 1, 1924 in Oleszyce, Poland, a community where over half of the people were Jews. She was the oldest of eight children. Her father, Israel Vogel, was the head of the Jewish community there and made a living distributing religious articles such as Torahs and Teffilins, to places all over the world. Galler's mother was Ita Prince from Jozefow.
During the occupation of Poland, the Nazis humiliated and persecuted the Jews in the town. They burned the synagogues and paraded the Jews through the streets. Galler remembers seeing her neighbors and friends laughing the whole time.
On October 14, 1942, Galler and her family, along with the other Jews in the community, were ordered to leave their homes and taken to the ghetto in Lubaczow. They were only allowed a few moments to pack. While at the ghetto, a Jewish man, who had escaped from Belzac concentration camp, came to warn them that it was not a work camp but an extermination camp.
On January 4, 1943, when Galler was only seventeen, the Gestapo evacuated the Lubachow ghetto. They put her and her family on a cattle train to take them to the Belzec death camp. Galler said in an interview, "my youngest brother was three years old and I still hear him scream, 'I want to live too.'" He died along with the rest of her family in the gas chambers at Belzac. Because they had heard such horrible things about Belzec, her Father urged her and her siblings to jump out the train window and try to escape. Many young people were shot and killed as they tried to jump off the moving train, including Galler's brother, Berele ( aged 15), and sister, Hannah (aged 16). However, Galler managed to avoid being shot after landing in a deep snow bank. She then hiked through the forest to Oleszyce where she was sheltered by two non-Jewish women for a few hours. However, they were afraid to help her anymore for fear of being caught. Galler remembers that nobody helped her after that and she had to survive on her own. She was able to board a train for Kraków, Poland, but was found by the authorities with other orphans. However, she was mistaken for a Gentile and sent to Germany as a slave laborer.
Galler eventually ended up in Sudetenland, on the German-Czechoslovakian border, and worked on a farm there to start her new life. After the war was over, she returned to Poland and found that out of the 3,000 Jewish people in Oleszyce, only 12 had survived the war. She was reunited with her sweetheart Henry Galler, whom she had known before the war began. They were married in Sweden in 1946 and lived there for 8 years. At first they lived in poverty, off of a dishwashers’ salary, but eventually Henry got a high school degree was hired as a foreman. During this time, Galler made blouses in a factory. After three years in Sweden, their first child was born.
In 1954, the couple emigrated to the United States, living in New York City for seven years, and then settling in New Orleans. Galler had 3 daughters and 8 grandchildren.
In 1985, Galler graduated from the University of New Orleans. She said in an interview that at first she did not want to talk about the war, but eventually she and her husband went to schools to tell their story to students.
Because of Hurricane Katrina, Galler and her husband moved to Dallas, Texas. Galler died there on January 5, 2006.