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- Faye Lincoln, a Utah resident, shares her parents' Holocaust survival story.
- Her mother narrowly escaped death at Auschwitz, defying Dr. Josef Mengele.
- Lincoln's parents survived due to their tailoring skills, despite immense hardships.
SALT LAKE CITY — Monday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day to reflect on the atrocities and genocide against the Jews in World War II. A Jewish Utah woman, whose parents survived one of the worst concentration camps of the war, shared what it was like for them.
"This is the photo of my mother's family. You can see my mother," said Faye Lincoln, whose parents survived the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Lincoln said the photo of her mother is one of few keepsakes that survived World War II and her parents' imprisonment in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
"It's quite emotional every time I think about their experiences there," Lincoln said.
She said her parents never spoke of the atrocities they faced, but her mother finally opened up 50 years later about being taken from their home in Poland and arriving at the camp.
"The first person that she ended up running into was Dr. Josef Mengele, the 'Angel of Death,'" Lincoln said.
She said she and her father got separated into two different lines. It quickly became apparent that Mengele had picked her for the crematorium, so she snuck her way back to her husband.
"She made it to the back of the lines, and she started to run to the other side of the camp, which would've been the Auschwitz side of the camp, and the German soldiers actually shot at her. But they missed, and she made it to the Auschwitz side of the camp," Lincoln said.
She said her parents were only 24 years old at the time. She believes one of the reasons they both survived was because her mother was a dressmaker and her father a tailor, which led to both becoming useful in sewing uniforms and other clothing.
Her mother was only 4 feet 9 inches, and gutsy enough to defy orders by a soldier to fill a mass grave.
"She says, 'I'm not going to do this. So shoot me,'" Lincoln said. "Apparently, they didn't."
These two short stories are very rare. At one point, filmmaker Steven Spielberg asked to interview Lincoln's mother for a documentary, and she turned it down because she didn't want to talk about it. It tells you how painful it was still decades later.
