KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Sonia Warshawski survived three different Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust in World War II. Even now, all these years later, it pains her to discuss it.
“When I hear Nazi, Neo-Nazi, it goes through me like an electric shock,” said the Kansas City-area Holocaust Survivor.
“The horrors are unimaginable.”
Warshawski said watching white power and Neo-Nazi groups in Virginia over the weekend is like reliving a nightmare. She says she’s speaking out to keep a promise from her time in a concentration camp.
“The dying said: ‘If you make it, remember to tell the story. The real story and what took place’. It’s impossible for normal people to believe what they did to us,” she said.
For years after the war, Warshawski didn’t talk about her time in places like Auschwitz, where the S.S. burned a serial number into her arm. Until on the radio one day, she heard someone denying that the Holocaust ever happened.
“It’s like a thunder came to my brain: ‘Hey, Sonia! This is the reason you survived. You have to tell the world to let them know what you have seen,’” she recalled.
And Warshawski admits there’s another reason she’s speaking out. Warshawski claims there are chilling similarities between the mood in Germany and Poland all those years ago, and what she’s seeing in America in 2017.
“You don’t have any idea because I tell you, any normal person will never understand, and feel it, what was done. In the 20th century! That’s the reason I say: it can happen again,” she said.