Dora Niederman was born in Bhuce, a village in the mountains of Czechoslovakia. The Germans occupied her town in April 1944. She was sixteen. With the collaboration of Hungarian policemen, the Nazis concentrated the Jews in a ghetto. A short time later, they ordered the Jews into cattle cars and sent them on a tortuous three day journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Dora was separated from her family during the "selection" on the "ramp" at Birkenau. After six weeks at Birkenau, Dora was sent to Stutthof death camp. From there, she and her friends were dispatched to work on a German farm, where they were decently treated. With the approach of the Red Army in late 1944, the girls were taken back to Stutthof. During a "death march" the girls escaped and found shelter with a courageous (anonymous) Polish family. The girls were "liberated" by the Red Army, a dark, painful chapter in itself. After the war, in a "Displaced Persons" camp in Italy, Dora met her future husband Isaac Niederman, a Holocaust survivor from Rumania. They moved to New Orleans in 1950.
This series was funded by the Rita and Harold Divine Foundation, the Siggy Boraks Family, and made possible by the generous contribution of video production services of WDSU-TV in New Orleans.