--- title: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Anniversary: A Survivor's Remembrance description: Sonia Klein was a teenager in hiding during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. This is her story. canonical: https://time.com/4779148/warsaw-ghetto-survivor-account/ author: Lily Rothman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-05-16T14:00:46.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-13T08:08:21.000Z article:section: History og:title: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Anniversary: A Survivor's Remembrance og:description: Sonia Klein was a teenager in hiding during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 og:url: https://time.com/4779148/warsaw-ghetto-survivor-account/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9ff3983c3a07357b/6988cd450a4a2289ed9ce288/uprising.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Anniversary: A Survivor's Remembrance twitter:description: Sonia Klein was a teenager in hiding during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9ff3983c3a07357b/6988cd450a4a2289ed9ce288/uprising.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # 'Either We Go or We Burn Right Here': A Survivor Remembers the Warsaw Ghetto > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-sub-2026q3/newsletters?i=a09a4c56-f974-4561-aa96-4e07f0fefa83&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) * TIME Subscriptions: [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-sub-2026q3/subscribe?i=a09a4c56-f974-4561-aa96-4e07f0fefa83&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The Last Nazi Trials [Watch (HLS stream): The Last Nazi Trials](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/iBig1Tcg.m3u8) (7:02)  _Published 2016-05-03. The trial of a former Nazi guard brings forth questions about justice and forgiveness for Holocaust survivors and German citizens._  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Updated: Dec 13, 2023 8:08 AM UTCPublished: May 16, 2017 2:00 PM UTC  Jewish people being led for deportation in the Warsaw Ghetto, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Jewish people being led for deportation in the Warsaw Ghetto, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Universal History Archive / UIG / Getty Images  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Updated: Dec 13, 2023 8:08 AM UTCPublished: May 16, 2017 2:00 PM UTC For many of Europe’s imprisoned Jews, it would be easy to read the events of this day, May 16, in 1943, as an end of hope. It was then that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, one of the most significant acts of resistance [during the Holocaust](http://time.com/3813714/holocaust-remembrance-day-warsaw/), was quashed. But one woman who lived through it sees things differently. Survival, she says, depended on finding some tiny source of hope and holding on. “When you are drowning and you see a straw, you hang onto the straw,” Sonia Klein, now 91 and living in Brooklyn, N.Y., tells TIME. “Is the straw going to save you? No, but the touch of hope may.” Klein grew up as part of the thriving Jewish community in the city of Warsaw — a community that was, before the Holocaust, as [TIME would later point out](http://time.com/vault/issue/2002-10-28/page/67/), the world’s biggest outside New York. About a third of the city’s[ 1.3 million residents](https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005069) were Jewish. In October of 1940, with Nazi forces occupying the city, those hundreds of thousands of people were confined to a ghetto of only a little more than a square mile. As Klein tells it now, they were promised that if they reported to certain areas of the city they would find work and food. They were starving already, so they did. Because her uncle already had a building in the ghetto, she and her parents and siblings were able to get a room — but for an area of that size to absorb so many new residents essentially overnight was impossible. Most people were left on the street. “People were starving and it was winter and people were dying. Every morning that you were able to go out, you saw corpses,” she says. “Not even covered with newspapers, because there wasn’t enough time to do it, this is how many people were gone. How can one forget this?” _Read more:_ [_Color Photos From Nazi-Occupied Poland_](http://time.com/3878017/world-war-ii-color-photos-from-nazi-occupied-poland-1939-1940/) Around the end of 1942, Klein says, word began to spread that the people who had been deported from the ghetto, supposedly to labor camps, were in fact being killed. Her father and a few other men used their hands to dig a hiding spot under the basement of a building, hoping that their families could survive inside for at least a year. By early 1943, they were underground. Each day, one person could go out to bring back food, using a designated knock to get back inside. It was from there, in hiding but with radios informing them about the outside world, that they heard what was going on above ground: an [uprising](http://100photos.time.com/photos/jewish-boy-surrenders-warsaw). As the uprising continued over the next several weeks, one of Klein’s compatriots went out for food and was followed back to the hiding space. The secret knock came and when the residents looked up, they saw the telltale boots of the Nazis there to take them away. Coming to the surface for the first time since she had gone into hiding, she saw that while they were underground the ghetto had been destroyed. As TIME would [later](http://time.com/vault/issue/1948-05-03/page/30/) describe it, in the wake of the first wave of resistance, “\[the\] Germans brought re-enforcements from Galicia; waves of bombers swept over the defenseless ghetto, raining incendiaries and high explosive. It took them 42 days to level every building.” “At this point we had two choices,” Klein says. “One was to remain there, and the ghetto was in flames already. The houses were burning in the ghetto. Life is a very precious thing and we said, well, either we go or we burn right here. We went out.” Klein and the dozens of people she’d been in hiding with were taken to Majdanek. For the act of not letting go of her young son’s hand, Klein’s mother was killed. Her brother, too. Her father (who would die soon after) was separated from Klein and her sister, who a few weeks later were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Klein believes that, due to the fact that it was the end of April when she was found, she must have been on one of the last transports out of the ghetto. Soon after, the uprising ended. Nazi forces deported about 42,000 Jews — almost everyone who remained, after thousands more had been killed during the uprising, compared to a dozen Germans killed during the initial fighting — to concentration camps or labor camps, [according](https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005188) to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. When the war in Europe ended almost exactly two years later, Klein and her sister had been on a months-long death march after having been shipped from camp to camp as the Allies closed in. All along, she says, she kept her spark of hope alive by promising herself that she would not be silent if she survived. Klein met her husband just after the camps were freed and she says he started telling people what he had been through “since the day he was liberated.” But she found that talking about what she had seen was like reliving it, and she kept it mostly inside. All the while, she made a new life in the United States, first in Buffalo, N.Y., and then in New York City after her husband’s death; she and her sister still live near one another. About five years ago, Klein decided that her story was too important not to share. Silence, she says, means it could happen again. One of the ways she does so is through a program called [Witness Theater](https://www.ujafedny.org/event/view/witness-theater/), which pairs Holocaust survivors with high-school students for a yearlong program during which the students, meeting regularly with the survivors and therapists and drama teachers, write a play to tell the survivors’ stories. “What the kids talk about is that they take on the obligation,” says Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the [Claims Conference](http://www.claimscon.org/), which supports the initiative. “It’s passing on this obligation to a new generation who then become the witnesses.” Other people cannot truly comprehend what she went through, Klein says, but at least they listen. Not that telling the story has gotten any easier over the years. “I sit here calm and collected,” Klein says. “Do you think I’m going to sleep tonight? No. But that’s a small price to pay for what we owe our loved ones.” ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] Our family had tried so hard to stay together. My sister Edith was about 12 years old was sent in the direction that my mother went. The SS guard he motioned me to in the direction other young adults went. I didn't move. I leaned over peering into the crowd and trying to see if Edith had caught up. I was horrified that she would not find our mother. She would be lost to our family, alone amongst strangers. The trauma of this separation Lingers with me to this day. [ MUSIC ] [ SOUND ] [ CROSSTALK ] It's not a matter of Sending him to jail for the rest of his life. I don't feel that, that will help, but what's happening now will help. And today, I must do what I'm asked to do and not stop and cry because that is not what's required at the moment [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Okay look at me. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ LAUGH ] It's a teaching moment for the entire country of Europe to rethink and learn from it. [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ MUSIC ] The lawyers were searching for people Survivors. They asked, would I come, and do I know anything about this Nazi guard, and of course no. I was much too distracted to look into his face, but I was not required to have remembered the face, so I said yes. If I can help. I would come. So far over the last seven decades, prosecutors just focused on the murder of the people who arrived in Auschwitz on the lam and then were gassed right No prosecutor ever brought forward a charge, saying that a guard is also responsible for making it possible that the people who were prisoners in the camp were murdered systematically. And the indictment against Hanning is the first indictment that actually says Auschwitz was altogether A organized factory of mass murder. Not only the selection on the [ INAUDIBLE ] This is, I am here. Right here standing here. As I said in the testimony, I had just been separated from my younger sister, and as I was saying I didn't leave. I actually defied orders, I just stood there. How am I to leave her like this? People tell me, you know she died, you know everybody died, and it's been a long time. And it doesn't help. [ MUSIC ] This is Council Aide and Justice Says it's too little, and is a enormous failure, it's a system in the end does the right thing, it's better than not going. I think the main purpose of this trials is to give justice to our clients, it's for them. I just want him to Hear from me and others who testified, what the consequences were of what he did at a young age. But he keeps his eyes down, head down. I don't know whether he doesn't want to face the survivors. What his motivation is. I really don't know. [ FOREIGN ] And the further you go down in the chain of command, the more the question arises of how far legal responsibility goes. And if none of the witnesses know the defendant, this, in the view of the defense, is a testament to how unremarkable the defendant possibly was. [ MUSIC ] I'm not interested in the personality of the defendant. For me he's a broken, failed person. What is he supposed to do? He's defending himself? That's ridiculous. What is he supposed to do? He's defending himself? That's ridiculous. If he was a warden in Auschwitz, I already judge him. I can't judge that. Forgiveness? Maybe he just... How many people followed? How many people killed? Maybe they didn't have a choice but to act in that way? [ MUSIC ] There's a lot of talk of forgiveness, I'm very surprised about it. Everybody had to do their part or it wouldn't have worked efficiently. How does mass murder get forgiven? [ MUSIC ] The crime is so enormous, it's not a forgivable crime, it's a crime to be analyzed and learned from. 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