There are less than a dozen Holocaust survivors in Charleston.
Waltraud Georgine "Ms. Gina" Rose Weigert (now Kane) is one of them, but her story may look a little different from what other survivors might share.
Gina is from a German family that was against Adolf Hitler, and the family paid for it by being sent to the concentration camp Dachau in 1943; Gina was a toddler at the time.
Hanahan High’s auditorium was packed Friday morning by students who came to listen to Gina share a story detailing the horrors of the Holocaust, and the love and strength that helped her family survive the ordeal.
Gina was joined by her moderator, Mary Huffman, an assistant professor of elementary education at East Carolina University, in recounting the following events.
‘Unwanted’ people
Gina was born in 1940 in Žim, Czechoslovakia; at the time it was located in Sudetenland, the historical German name for the northern, southern and western areas of former Czechoslovakia which were inhabited primarily by Sudeten Germans. Nazi Germany occupied Sudetenland from 1938 to 1945.
Gina was born to a middle class family, the second daughter of a portrait painter, Leopold, and his wife, Ingeborg, during a time when it was important to provide proof of one’s German ancestry.
Her father and her aunt worked hard to prove they were pure Germans; they went through churches and graveyards, jotting down all their family history so they could prove they were 100 percent pure Germans who could trace their family history all the way back to the 1600s. Their ancestry papers were signed and stamped by Adolf Hitler himself (Gina showed copies these documents to the students at Hanahan High).
However, her family did not like what Hitler was doing to Germany.
“Basically he was a bully,” she said, adding, “He was going to take over the world – he was that much of a bully. He was going to take everything and every place, and he started with Czechoslovakia, and then with Poland, and then with Austria, and Germany got bigger and bigger.”
Anti-Hitler families like the Weigerts were considered traitors to Germany and persecuted; they would be killed outright or sent to concentration camps.
For safety, Ingeborg took her three children and relocated to some property Gina’s grandmother owned outside of Innsbruck, Austria. A neighbor found out Ingeborg, then 23 years old, was anti-Hitler and turned the family in immediately; the authorities arrived that very same day.
At that point, Leopold had already been forced to join the Czechoslovakian Army for speaking out against Hitler and was captured by the Russian Army, who sent him to Siberia. His wife and children had no idea what became of him.
Upon being seized by the authorities in Austria, and carrying with them nothing but backpacks, the rest of the family moved around by train for two weeks with no idea where they would end up. When they finally arrived at a small town outside of Dachau, Ingeborg knew she and her children were about to become prisoners.
Gina was three years old at the time she arrived at the camp. Her older sister, Gerlinde, was five years old, and their younger brother, Udo, was one.
Dachau was one of the first concentration camps built in Nazi Germany, initially created specifically for “unwanted” people like the Weigerts who opposed Hitler. Over time, other groups were also interned at the camp, particularly Jews. Prisoners were used as forced laborers, and Dachau was also known for conducting experiments on the prisoners.
Ingeborg was put to work along with other moms who were sent to the camp. Her mom had some former experience working in a dentist office, and was put to work in the camp as a dental assistant, helping to pull gold and silver teeth from the mouths of prisoners for the Germans to repossess.
“They didn’t give them any medication for pain, but she would wipe the blood off, and then sent the next one to come in,” Gina said. “In Europe, it was very popular to have silver or gold teeth, and those were the ones that got pulled.”
Dachau had one barrack for working women with children. While Ingeborg worked, the children were kept in a small room containing jail-like cells. The cells contained a cot, a blanket and a bucket that served as a toilet; Gina and Gerlinde had to teach Udo how to use the bucket as a mere 1-year-old since they did not have any diapers.
“I remember very little, but we were always hungry, and we were always unhappy,” she said. “My sister and my mother, they were the strong ones. They kept us going.”
Ingeborg would be gone all day working, so Gerlinde tended to her younger siblings, passing the time during the day by telling stories and teaching them things she had previously learned in school, using the dirt on the floor as a sort of slate to teach her siblings numbers and letters from the alphabet.
“We came from a very smart family, so I always give my sister credit – she was the smart one,” Gina said.
The children longed to go play outside, but they were only let out once a day and only for a few minutes at a time. Children from neighboring cells would be released at different times because the soldiers did not want any fraternizing while they were outside.
The family lived like that for two years.
Gina and her siblings were always relieved whenever their mom would return to the cell; there were times when moms would disappear, and their children would be put on a train and sent “God knows where.”
“It was sad,” Gina said.
Ingeborg would return to the cell with a simple piece of stale bread for dinner, but would go hungry so her children could eat.
“She was always kind to us,” Gina said. “We would sing when my mom came home…it made her feel better and it made us feel better.”
Eventually, the moms and children in the neighboring cells learned the songs, and they joined in too.
Liberation
Gina does not remember arriving at the camp, but she remembers the day the American soldiers liberated it in April 1945.
The children could hear bombing and commotion going on, but a lot of noise at the camp was normal so they did not pay any attention to it.
And then it got quiet.
Ingeborg was away working when the door to the room holding the children suddenly opened up, and two American soldiers walked in and looked around – Gina showed Hanahan High a picture of the three of them in the cell on the day the soldiers liberated Dachua.
Gina and her siblings initially got scared, thinking maybe they were Russians, and huddled in a corner of their cell, facing away from the soldiers, even as they offered the children things like cookies and chocolate.
“My mom always said, ‘Don’t take anything from anybody,’ and we were listening to my mom, even when she wasn’t there,” she said.
None of the Weigert children weighed more than 25 pounds when they were rescued. Gina remembers the first real meal she ate was a half of a boiled potato (“I love my potatoes,” she said) and string beans. Her mom rationed the food and made sure the children ate very slowly so they would not overeat and get sick (there were prisoners who died from overeating after being liberated because they could not handle the sudden caloric intake and digestion, so Ingeborg was smart to do this).
The family was sent to a farm in Oldezhousen, Germany, where they lived in a loft over the cows for 10 months. In the meantime, Dachau was repurposed as a displaced persons’ camp for people who lost their homes in the war (all of Munich was basically bombed at this point). With nowhere to live, the Weigerts returned to the camp.
The family learned that Leopold was still alive in Siberia. The Russians held onto him for a while because they found out he was painter – and they liked his work – and they used him to paint portraits of Russia. He was one of the final prisoners to finally be released, and he eventually reunited with his family in 1952.
Gina’s family grew after the war; her parents welcomed a baby girl in 1953 and a baby boy in 1956.
“So we had a ‘before the war family’ and an ‘after the war family,’” she said.
Even after the war, the Weigerts faced further discrimination from native German families who looked down at those who occupied Dachau.
“We were the ‘slum people’,” Gina said. “I had to show everybody: it doesn’t work that way. You make something out of yourself, and then you prove them all wrong.”
Gina comes from a proudly educated family. She came to America in 1958 to finish her degree in accounting at Duke University. She made money working inside a Walgreens part-time.
“With my parents’ approval, they said, ‘make a life for yourself,’” she said, adding that her older sister and first younger brother also made the move to America.
When she made the move to American, she was amazed by the things Americans took for granted, like using a simple light switch to turn the lights on, or having air conditioning – things they did not have in the displaced persons camp.
“I said, ‘America’s my country,’” she said. “I’m the proudest American you’ll ever meet.”
She was hired by the National Press Association, traveling up and down the east coast of the United States for two years. During that time she met and married her husband and they made their home in Philadelphia. She became a U.S. Citizen in 1964. Gina is now the proud mother of five children and a grandmother to nine.
Gina worked for the Navy as an accountant. When the Philadelphia shipyard was closing down, the Navy gave them two options for relocation: Cleveland, Ohio or Charleston, South Carolina.
“My dad didn’t raise a dummy,” Gina said with a smile. “I came right here. I loved it.”
She has lived in the Charleston area since 1996.
A better future
Gina said she loved her time speaking at Hanahan High.
She encouraged students to remember to listen to their parents, to pursue their passions, and to just be good people.
“I tried to bring across to them: not to be bullies, not to be prejudiced, and to accept everybody for what they are,” she said. “If I can even put the little seed in their mind, I think that’s so important.”
Hanahan High students were allowed to ask Gina some questions; students were curious if Gina had a number tattooed on her arm.
“My mother had a tattoo, but children under 6 did not have to have a tattoo,” Gina said.
One student asked if she could speak German. Gina responded by speaking a fluent German sentence and then giving the English translation: “I do talk German with my (older) sister who lives in California…8’o’clock our time is 5’o’clock her time, and we talk to each other every day – it’s very important.” Gina also said she used to speak perfect Czech; she can still understand it.
Another student asked if anyone ever escaped Dachau. Gina said there was no escape, but there were people who killed themselves by climbing into what was known as the “hanging tree.”
“I never personally saw one there, but that’s what they called the hanging tree,” she said. “But nobody ever got out, as far as I know.”
Another student asked how Ingeborg was able to power through the whole experience; Gina said her mom was a strong woman who later ended up becoming the first-ever female city council member who was a displaced person – she was put in charge of all the kindergartens in Bavaria.
Seniors Jacob Clark and Logan Williams were among the students who listened to Gina’s story on Friday.
Clark said the biggest thing he took from Gina was it is one thing to hear these stories, it is another to take it and make sure history does not repeat itself.
“The biggest thing she talked about was how she was stuck in that cell,” Clark said. “I always had the idea that they were off in the fields and forced to do labor. One thing I never thought about was what the children were doing during those times when the parents were away working.”
Clark said he was appreciative to not only hear about historical events from a primary source, but the life lessons that accompanied it – “staying motivated when times were tough, or how to have a positive mindset.”
Williams echoed similar thoughts about Gina’s story.
“They (guest speakers) have incredible wisdom, incredible knowledge, to pass down to us that we can use to better ourselves and become a better society as a whole,” he said.
