Holocaust Survivor Dies In Tucson: Read Her Memories

TUCSON, AZ — Edith Weingarten Fox, who died in Tucson earlier this month at age 92, didn’t speak about her experiences during the Holocaust until nearly the end of her life. The memories of the four years she spent at the Auschwitz concentration camp were simply too painful.

When she did share those memories in 2017 on International Holocaust Memorial Day, it was because she was “afraid people are forgetting,” she told the Arizona Daily Star. “We can never forget what happened. We can never let it happen again.”

The youngest of six children and the only girl, she was 13 in 1941 when the Nazis rounded up her parents and three of her brothers in Czechoslovakia and took them to Poland. Two of her brothers had been drafted into the Czech Army.

The Nazis shot her mother in front of her, and Fox asked them to kill her, too, but told her that she was going to work. Separated from her father and brothers, she never saw them again. She was taken to the ghetto in Stanislau, Poland, where hundreds of toddlers of Jewish families were housed. When the Nazis came, the toddlers and the adults housing them hid in a bunker, but were ultimately killed.

Fox and her friend, Leah, survived by hiding in a chimney for three days. They walked for days trying to reach the Czech border with Hungary. Her friend was killed and Fox was captured and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. In her words from the Arizona Daily Star:

“While I was in Auschwitz, I saw too many things. Some people couldn’t take it anymore and ran into the electrified fence to kill themselves. They just went up in flames. I saw people coming into Auschwitz from different places who were sent to take a shower and were killed. Then they took them to the crematorium. … It was unbelievable. They were so organized. They said they wanted to kill 10,000 Jews every day.”

She survived Auschwitz and had other brushes with death before the Russians liberated the Theresienstadt concentration camp on May 8, 1945. Political prisoners held there had already been killed, “and we were next,” she told the Arizona Daily Star.

It was two years before she would emigrate to America at age 19. She eventually settled in Buffalo, New York, where she met her husband, Joseph Fox. They had three children and eventually moved to Tucson. He died in 1997.

Edith Fox died Feb. 16 at her home in Tucson.

» Read the full interview with the Arizona Daily Star.