Margit
A Teenager's Journey through the Holocaust and Beyond
By Margit Feldman and Bernard Weinstein
"After reading only a few pages of this book, I immediately became a traveler with
Margit, experiencing life with her as a young child before the Holocaust, the
horrors of the Shoah through her teen years, and her life as an adult in America.
This book will be an excellent instructional tool... Readers of this book will feel
and understand the consequences of bias, prejudice, and discrimination, wherever
and whenever they exist."
Dr. Paul B. Winkler
Executive Director, New Jersey Commission
on Holocaust Education
By an uncanny coincidence, Margit was born on the same day and in the same year
as Anne Frank and was very likely in Bergen-Belsen when Anne died there. She
feels, in a real sense, a special connection to Anne Frank, but she also feels
linked to many others who did not live to tell their own stories. Her aim in this
book is to speak for those who did not survive.
When Margit Buchhalter (now Feldman) was fifteen years old, the serene, secure,
and happy life she had known in rural Hungary was shattered by the horrors of
the Holocaust. During her family's Passover celebration of 1944, they were forced
from their home to a crowded and oppressive ghetto, then transported to Auschwitz,
where Margit lost her parents and nearly seventy other family members. Subsequently
she suffered starvation, brutality, physical punishment, and the constant terror
of the instant annihilation. She endured five incarcerations in concentration
camps and a death march.
After being liberated from Bergen-Belsen, Margit was taken to Sweden to recover
from illness and abuse. There she was given the love she needed to gradually
renew her faith in humanity, and she created a new life for herself. That new
life brought her to America and to a branch of her family she had never met before.
Love, marriage, and the eventual establishment of her own family brought a renewal
of spirit, and ultimately the discovery of her life's mission: to teach others
what she had experienced and witnessed during the terrible days of 1944-45. This
mission, which has led her to teach thousands of students and hundreds of teachers,
is the force that has motivated her to this day.
By: Margit Feldman and Bernard Weinstein
With a forward by: New Jersey Governor James E. McGreevey
Distributed by the State of New Jersey Committee on Holocaust Education
Published 2003
Hardcover and Dust Jacket; 175 pages
Includes 25 black and white pictures.
$20.00