The Timekeeper
(Facebook)

 In May 1944, a train arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau carrying Jewish families from the Subcarpathian region of Czechoslovakia.

Among them was a 14-year-old girl named Irene Fogel. She was holding her mother's hand.
On the selection platform, SS officers moved along the arriving prisoners and directed them with gestures — left or right, a few seconds per person, no explanation given. Those judged capable of forced labor went one direction. Everyone else went another. Irene was sent left. Her mother and her younger siblings were sent right.
She did not know, in that moment, exactly what the separation meant. She would come to understand it.
Her mother and siblings were killed that day.
Irene was put to work. The conditions in the camp — the starvation rations, the forced labor, the cold, the systematic cruelty designed not just to kill but to dehumanize before killing — were such that survival from one day to the next required something beyond physical endurance. Many people who entered the camp healthy were dead within weeks.
Irene developed a discipline of thought that she has described in testimony given over many decades of bearing witness. Each morning she told herself something simple: if she was alive today, she could be alive tomorrow. Not next week. Not until liberation. Just tomorrow. The horizon stayed close enough to reach.
She was liberated in 1945, severely malnourished, weighing a fraction of what a healthy teenager should weigh. The war had consumed six years and murdered six million Jewish people, including her mother and her siblings and the wider world of her childhood.
She survived.
In the decades that followed, Irene Fogel Weiss rebuilt a life. She became a teacher. She married and had children and grandchildren — a family that exists because she kept telling herself, one morning at a time, that tomorrow was reachable.
And she became a witness.
She has testified before the United States Congress. She traveled to Germany in 2015 to testify at the trial of Oskar Gröning, a former SS guard at Auschwitz, and spoke directly about what she had seen and survived. She has worked with the USC Shoah Foundation and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to ensure that her testimony is preserved — that what happened at Auschwitz is documented in the words of people who were there, for generations who were not.
She does this because she understands something that the passage of time tends to obscure: the Holocaust was not an abstraction or a historical category. It was a specific crime committed against specific people — her mother, her siblings, the families who arrived on that platform and did not walk away from it. Testimony is the act of insisting that those people remain specific, that they are not dissolved into statistics, that the fact of what was done to them retains the power to demand a response.
Irene Fogel Weiss is in her nineties. She is still speaking.
Her survival is not a story about extraordinary heroism in the conventional sense. She did not escape or lead a resistance or perform a dramatic act of defiance. She survived by enduring what was being done to her, by keeping her mind oriented toward the next day when the present day was unbearable, by refusing — in the only way available to her — to be entirely destroyed.
And then she spent the rest of her life making sure the world did not forget what she had witnessed.
The people who built Auschwitz intended to eliminate not just lives but memory — to kill the victims and then kill the record of their existence. Irene Fogel Weiss has spent eight decades defeating that intention.
She arrived at Auschwitz at 14, holding her mother's hand.
She is still here. Still speaking. Still insisting that what happened must be remembered and must never happen again.
That is what survival, in its fullest meaning, looks like.