A timeline of discrete events in Nina's life and the history around it. Where she spoke about an event in her testimony, her voice carries the entry. Historical events she lived through but did not describe directly are included for context.
1928 – 2019 · Ninety-one years · Born Łódź · Died Israel
Born into a Yiddish- and Polish-speaking family in one of Europe's largest Jewish communities. The world was ending already, but a five-year-old could only read it in the faces of the adults.
Born Nina Guttman, an only child, after her parents had been married sixteen years.
I was born in the clinic of Dr. Guttstadt, because as a child I used to go for walks with my parents, and they would show me the place. Down below it there was a statue of a stork.
The burning of the German parliament — the Nazis' pretext for suspending civil liberties. Five-year-old Nina's father returned from Berlin with both news and an unfamiliar fruit.
I remember my father coming back from a trip to Berlin. That was the first time I ate a banana — he had brought bananas home. But he also spoke about the Reichstag fire. I didn't really know what the Reichstag was, but I saw the expressions on people's faces around me and understood that it was something bad.
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign a non-aggression pact whose secret protocol carves up Eastern Europe. Nina, on vacation, saw it on a newsstand.
I saw a newspaper whose headline I didn't understand. It was about the Ribbentrop–Molotov Agreement… I didn't understand what that was, but once again, people made concerned faces and we were told to understand that this was not something good.
Within days German forces occupy Łódź.
When I returned to Łódź, the whole city was trenches. They were preparing trenches for war. And within a few days, the Germans entered the city without much resistance. And I, as a child, was very frightened.
An order requires all Jews in Łódź to wear a yellow band on the sleeve.
It was a shock. It wasn't a patch yet at that time; it was still just a stripe. I think it was a shock, suddenly being marked as different from everyone else. I know people said, "I won't wear that, no matter what." But we got used to it.
Four and a half years behind wire and a wooden footbridge. Nina lost both parents here, was adopted by Luba Chesnowitz, worked in the Schneider Ressort, and survived the Sperre.
The Nazi authorities decree the establishment of a Jewish district in the Bałuty and Old Town quarters of Łódź. Jewish residents are given weeks to move in.
The family loads a hand-pulled cart and leaves Południowa 58 for the old quarter.
Very, very traumatic, because we moved into completely different conditions. These were very old, very small houses. In many of them there was no running water, and the toilet was out in the yard. Even renting a room from a family was difficult. People just poured in and crowded into a tiny area. Life was very, very hard.
The ghetto becomes the second-largest in Nazi-occupied Europe, surrounded by wire and bisected by a main street crossed by a wooden footbridge.
The Łódź Ghetto was actually divided into two parts, cut through by a main street which was also fenced off. A wooden bridge passed over it so you could cross from one side to the other… That bridge appears in many pictures; it is the symbol of the Łódź Ghetto.
Yechiel Meir Guttman dies of complications from pneumonia. Nina is thirteen.
My father died in the fall of 1941, and my mother in the summer of 1942.
Anna Guttman dies after surgery for breast cancer in the ghetto hospital. Nina, now fourteen and orphaned, encounters nursing for the first time.
It was the first time I saw a hospital, and I saw nurses and the care they gave. I think even then it began to appeal to me — that being a nurse and helping others is something beautiful.
The Allgemeine Gehsperre selection: over 15,000 children, elderly, and sick are deported from the Łódź Ghetto to the Chełmno death camp under a general curfew. Nina is sick in bed.
When they said we had to go out, I went out. I didn't really understand what was happening. Left, right — people were being crushed together. I went back home, to that little room we called home. And then I discovered that most of the children who were around my age had also been taken away, among them two of my cousins.
Noticed by Luba Chesnowitz in the corridor of the Schneider Ressort — recognized by her black mourning clothes — Nina moves in with Luba and her husband, a factory manager.
In that meeting it may not have been love at first sight, but it was certainly affection and respect — and within a few days I moved in with them. In fact, from that moment my life changed. There was someone who looked after me, someone who guided me.
The destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto by Nazi forces. A survivor arrives in Łódź and describes what happened.
After the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, a family arrived in Łódź. The head of the family was a friend of Mr. Chesnowitz. He sat with us at home almost an entire night and told us about the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. The next day, deeply shaken, I told my friend about it. She turned to me on the stairs and she said, "I don't believe a word you're saying." That very same friend I later met in Auschwitz.
The last major ghetto in occupied Europe is emptied. A few days before the Chesnowitz family is loaded onto a transport, a warning arrives in the form of a murder.
That same man I told you about earlier — the one who had sat with us all night and told about the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto — he worked with the Germans. They took him in a black limousine to the cemetery and put a bullet in his head… When they killed him, we somehow understood it was a sign that it wasn't going to be good — that the Germans didn't want any witnesses to survive.
Nine months that stretched the rest of her life. Sixteen on arrival in Birkenau; seventeen at liberation, weighing under thirty kilos.
A day and a night in a sealed freight car. Through the cracks, Nina and others called out to Polish farmers in the fields.
We called out to Poles working in the fields: "Where are we going?" And they said: "You're going to Oświęcim" — to Auschwitz. I didn't know what Auschwitz was. And they said, "If you have jewelry, if you have money, if you have anything, throw it to us, because you won't be remaining alive anyway."
The cars open onto the tracks. Families are separated in minutes.
There were masses of people. The shouting was deafening. The panic was enormous. People simply didn't understand. You couldn't grasp the speed with which they separated people. If you weren't holding someone's hand very, very tightly, you simply disappeared in the thousands of people there.
The SS physician, conducting selections on the ramp, decides who will live and who will die.
We passed by the selection of Dr. Mengele. We saw how he looked at people and said, "Left, right, left, right."
After being shaved and issued mismatched rags, Nina and the others learn the purpose of the place.
One of the workers in the barracks got up on the heating duct… and she said something like this: "This is a Sky Commando (Himmelfahrtskommando). No one leaves here. The families you just separated from were taken to the crematoriums. You here stayed alive."
Selected for labor, Nina and Luba are sent to a Sudetenland weapons factory. Others on the same day are sent to the crematorium.
Transport trucks passed by, open in the back, filled with hundreds of people. On one of those trucks, I recognized someone who was with me in the earlier barracks, but they didn't come to the labor camp with us. Apparently there were too many of us, and they simply went to the crematorium on the way from there.
Her birthday falls on Hitler's. The other women marked it anyway.
They celebrated my birthday inside the camp. My birthday is also Hitler's birthday. And they did it on Sunday evening, because everyone was in the camp and the lights were on… Everyone was there, and they gathered bits of bread among themselves and made me a cake out of bread as a birthday present.
Victory in Europe Day. The German guards vanish; Soviet forces arrive.
Suddenly someone came running and started shouting: "The Germans! The Germans fled! There is no one!" And then someone came and said, "The war is over." Then Russian soldiers started entering the camp. And the camp was open.
Home was gone. Poland was a graveyard. Three years across Berlin, Eschwege, Grottaferrata, Metaponto, Haifa, Cyprus — until Israel finally opened.
Nina and Luba travel back to Poland to search for surviving family.
We arrived in Łódź, got off at the train station. At that moment, someone on the street said hello to Luba: "I know you." He told us to contact the Jewish Community, gave us the address… It turned out that from my family almost nobody survived.
Having learned that her Warsaw cousins were handed to the Gestapo by Poles on the Aryan side, she joins a small group departing westward.
I looked from the train station at Łódź and I knew that I would never return there again. Even after the war, I did not go to see our house from before the war, nor my living quarters in the ghetto. I simply didn't think I wanted to see how people lived inside my house. I did not want to face that reality and see it.
Nina is registered as a displaced person and given work registering other refugees arriving at the camp.
I immediately started working, since I knew both English and German. Not well, but I knew them. And also reading and writing. So they took me to work registering the refugees who came to the camp.
Polish civilians and militia murder at least 42 Jewish survivors in the city of Kielce, confirming for many survivors that there was no future in Poland.
After the war, when so few people remained and returned, there was a pogrom against Jews in the city of Kielce, and many Jews were killed. And it was the only country that treated its remnant survivors in this way.
Nina joins a Hashomer Hatzair group preparing for immigration to Palestine, and begins working with the Bricha — the underground network moving survivors across borders.
We had to transport big groups, sometimes of 200 people, sometimes in the dark, with packages through a field. In the first meeting, I remember them sometimes saying: "Oh, you're our guide? So tiny!"
The group moves south, lodged in requisitioned villas near Rome while awaiting passage to Palestine.
In Italy, we were in a little town near Rome called Grottaferrata. Every house we stayed in there was a villa. I recall we lived in Villa Cicero… The conditions were not very good because we slept on military cots and had very simple food, but we were happy, knowing that we would, at some point, get to Palestine.
Her ship, boarding from Metaponto, began taking on water as it approached Palestine. The British diverted them to the detention camps in Cyprus.
We did not fight the British because our ship was beginning to sink and we called them for help. The ship was tilting completely to the side. They brought us to the port of Haifa. We saw Haifa like Moses saw the Promised Land. They brought us over onto British destroyers… and transferred us with great respect to Cyprus.
David Ben-Gurion proclaims Israeli independence in Tel Aviv. War begins the same day.
After fourteen months in Cyprus, Nina is permitted to enter Israel. She arrives to a country at war and to a public unable or unwilling to hear what she had survived.
The reception in Israel was very, very difficult in that sense, because at first, no one wanted to listen. I think the community in Israel was busy with its own problems, its losses, its pain, and didn't want to hear. The things sounded simply fantastical; even people who had been through those things found it hard to believe that it was true.
Nursing school, marriage, widowhood at thirty-four, two sons raised alone, decades at Nahariya Hospital, and — finally, at seventy — a microphone in her own living room.
After a short stay at Kibbutz Beit Alfa, Nina enters the nursing school at Assuta Hospital in Tel Aviv, fulfilling the aspiration that began at her mother's bedside in the ghetto.
After finishing nursing school and working as an instructor at Assuta, Nina marries and travels to London for further study.
I then got married and went to continue my studies in London. I came back and had two children.
A car accident. Nina is widowed with a five-year-old and a three-year-old.
In '62, when my children were five and three, my husband was killed in a car accident. So I was a full-time mom, and a full-time nurse, and a part-time student.
After decades at the hospital in Nahariya, Nina retires. She continues her studies in sociology and anthropology at the University of Haifa.
At age seventy, Nina sits for interview with Efrat Komisar in Tel Aviv for the USC Shoah Foundation. She explains why she finally agreed to speak after a lifetime of silence.
She told me that her brother was a Holocaust denier. Then I decided that it was not enough to have numbers. If there is such a phenomenon, where they say that it did not happen and was [a lie], then we are obligated to do something.
All quoted material is verbatim from the canonical English manuscript of Nina Muller's USC Shoah Foundation testimony, recorded October 29, 1998, in Tel Aviv. Interviewer: Efrat Komisar. Conducted in Hebrew.
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