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Irene Safran Short Story

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When Irene Safran was only twenty-one years old, her carefree life ended in the face of the Holocaust. Born to two Jewish parents as one of ten children-- four girls and six boys in all-- in Munkachevo, Czechoslovakia around the year 1923, her world changed in early April 1944 when she and her family were transferred to a Jewish ghetto. For the next year, Irene's life was a series of deaths, losses, and humiliations no human should ever have to suffer, culminating, years later, with a triumphant ending. Her story is proof that the human spirit can triumph over all manner of adversity and evil. It was the beginning of spring in 1944 when her suffering began: Irene and her family were forcibly evacuated from her home and brought to Jewish Street in the Jewish ghettos. They left most of their material possessions behind, carrying what their arms could hold, and lived on the floor of a stranger's house. She described that street as "the dirtiest street [she] ever saw", but she was only there for a few weeks before being relocated to a brick factory. They stayed at that factory for five days, building temporary shelters out of bricks and being hit and forced to do tricks like dogs for the pleasure of the German and Hungarian soldiers, before they and the other Jews were loaded onto cattle trains and sent off to Auschwitz-Birkenau. For three days, Irene and her family-- those who were in the cart, her mother, father, three younger sisters and two of her brothers-- traveled to

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