Noemi Ban will never forget the Nazi guard with the white gloves and horse whip.

Packed with other Hungarian Jews in a train cattle car for eight days, she arrived at Auschwitz, Poland, in 1944. Prisoners lined up before the guard, who sent some people to his left and others to his right. Ban’s mother, younger sister, baby brother and grandmother were sent to the left — and that was the last time she saw them.

Ban was grouped with other young Jewish women at the forced labor camp. They were shaved from head to toe, then stuffed into barracks. They were fed just one piece of bread and one cup of cold coffee each day.

“We were always hungry,” Ban said. “We couldn’t wait for our next bread.”

The prisoners later learned the bread was partially made of sawdust. The female prisoners were also forced to drink a soup spiked with chemicals that stopped their menstruation and left many survivors sterile.

The prisoners learned quickly not to ask questions or disobey orders from their captors. One day, Ban asked a female guard about the fate of their loved ones. The guard called attention to a foul smell in the air, pointed to a gray cloud in the sky, then to a chimney spewing fire from a crematorium: “Here are your relatives.”

Ban, now a resident of Bellingham, shared her Holocaust experiences Nov. 18 at Village Green Retirement Campus in Federal Way. A native of Hungary, Ban was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp at age 21. After four months, she was transferred to work at a bomb factory in Buchenwald (“We were skeletons”). Ban and 11 other prisoners later escaped into a forest in Germany before being found by an American soldier — and ultimately freed.

Shortly after World War II ended, she reunited with her father in Budapest.

“His first question was, ‘Where are the rest of them?’” she said of her family.

Ban and her husband immigrated to the United States in 1957. Sharing these stories is her way of honoring family and the millions of people who died in the Holocaust.

“Every single day, I am happy and thankful to be alive,” she said. “I don’t hate. I learned in Auschwitz that hate destroys. If I had hate in my heart, I would not be free.”

Learn more

Noemi Ban is the author of “Sharing is Healing,” written with Dr. Ray Wolpow. The short book covers her camp experiences. To learn more, visit sharingishealing.com.