Annual teaching of the Holocaust workshop features Magda Brown

Magda Brown is a member of the Speaker’s Bureau of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Although it is painful to remember her horrendous experiences, she believes her story and others have to be told. From one-on-one interviews with students to auditorium speeches, Brown is on a mission to tell her story to as many people as possible. She has spoken to more than 100,000 people at schools, universities, churches, synagogues and other events. Here is her story.

On June 11, 1944, Brown’s 17th birthday, she and her family were crowded into a railroad boxcar with 80 other people. They traveled for three days without food, water, or any idea where they were being sent. The final destination was Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp located in Poland. After arriving, Brown was separated from her mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. They were sent directly into the gas chambers. It was the last time she saw them.

She was one of a thousand Jewish Hungarian women who were transported to Allendorf, Germany, a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp and the site of one of Germany’s largest munitions factories. The women worked under dangerous conditions making bombs and rockets, filling them with liquid chemicals. The chemicals turned their skin yellow, their hair orange and their lips purple.

At the end of March 1945, Brown and her group were sent on a death march to Buchenwald. She and several prisoners decided that they were going to attempt to escape. They crawled on the ground and hid in a nearby barn. For a day and a half, they hid in piles of straw, knowing that they would be shot if they were caught. Two American Armed Forces then discovered Brown and the other women and liberated them. Brown is forever grateful to these brave heroic soldiers.

Fortunately, after the war, Brown was able to make contact with her aunts and uncles in the U.S., who sponsored her immigration to the U.S. Her family members welcomed her to their home in Chicago in September 1946. It took many years for Brown to overcome recurring nightmares of the Holocaust. Eventually, Brown was able to put aside the past and build a future. With the help of the National Council of Jewish Women, Brown attended evening classes in American History and English. In 1949, she married Robert Brown and together they raised their daughter, Rochelle, and son, Bruce. Brown was finally reunited with her brother, Miklos, in 1962, nearly two decades later.