Mar 21, 2019 3 min read

A Holocaust survivor who survived a second alleged hate crime when he was late for services at Tree of Life synagogue last October as a gunman opened fire told a large audience at Washington & Jefferson College on Tuesday about his experiences in Hungary when he was a child.

“They came for us at noon.”

That’s how Judah Samet remembers the day that the Nazis came for him and his family. It was in 1944, when he was a 6-year-old.

“Lunch in Europe was the biggest meal of the day,” Samet recalled. “They knew that every Jew would be home.”

Despite being as young as an American kindergartner at that point, the memories are still indelibly etched in Samet’s mind. There was a loudspeaker announcing that everyone had 15 minutes to get out, and they could take whatever valuables they could cram into a suitcase and a change of underwear.

“We knew (the Germans) were killing people left and right,” Samet said.

The Nazis loaded Samet, his two brothers, his sister, his parents and other Jewish families in his native Debrecen, Hungary, onto trains and shipped them to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. The same camp where Anne Frank died, Samet managed to survive until the camp was liberated in April 1945, as did his siblings and his mother. His father died of typhoid fever, though, and members of Samet’s extended family were sent to other camps and never seen again.

Samet, a resident of Pittsburgh since the 1960s, recounted his experiences in a talk sponsored by the W&J Hillel Society, an organization for Jewish students. Now 81 and a congregant at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Samet pulled into the parking lot at the synagogue last Oct. 27 as a shooter killed 11 other members of the congregation.

But it was the terrors of the more distant past that Samet focused on at W&J. He credited his mother for his survival in the camp, calling her “fearless,” and “the hero of my story.”

“She was like an eagle, always covering and protecting us,” Samet explained.

After being liberated from Bergen-Belsen, his family went to Israel by way of France. After spending several years in France and serving in Israel’s army, he first came to North America in 1961, settling in Canada. He then migrated to New York, and eventually came to Pittsburgh, operating a jewelry shop.

It’s estimated that 70,000 people died at the Bergen-Belsen camp and up to 6 million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Among the things that kept him alive was hope, Samet said.

“People laid down and died,” he noted. “If you don’t have hope, you die.”