Holocaust survivor tells story to base Published April 20, 2007 By David L. Tijerina 43rd Airlift Wing Public Affairs POPE AIR FORCE BASE, N.C. -- "Never, never give up in the most horrible situation you find yourself in," Esther Gutman Lederman, a Holocaust survivor and author of "Surviving Hitler's Armies," told a Club Pope audience Tuesday. Mrs. Lederman, now 82 and a Chapel Hill resident, recounted her story of survival as a Jewish teenager in Poland from 1939-1945 to about 40 people. Her speech was part of Pope's Days of Remembrance for Victims of the Holocaust activities and coincided with national observances of the period. Mrs. Lederman was the eldest of two "loved and spoiled" teenage daughters from an affluent family in Lodz, Poland when Hitler's forces arrived in the city in September of 1939. At the time, it was the second most populated city in the country. Before long, Mrs. Lederman's family resorted to purchasing food from the black market at outrageous rates and she and her sister were forced to attend school in small study groups which met in secret. Mrs. Lederman said her mother resisted evacuating Lodz until December 1939, when the family finally fled to her uncle's home in Chmielnik, Poland, a town with a population around 12,000. "Imagine packing one bag and deciding what to take that would not reveal your real identity," Mrs. Lederman said. While in Chmielnik, she and her father were selected to work in a concentration camp, but a police official allowed her to escape. Using phony paperwork Mrs. Lederman fled to another city and posed as a Catholic governess. A family with ties to the underground resistance provided her refuge in a safe house, but not before first asking her to hide in nearby woods until a plan could be devised to aid her. "The most peculiar thing was that I felt no fear," Mrs. Lederman said. "I don't know if I was still in shock or of I had come to accept the inevitable." A few days later, she learned Chmielnik had fallen and her mother and sister were sent to a concentration camp. She never saw them again. Life for the refugees in the safe house and in its hidden bunker was one lived in constant fear--fear of capture and fear the hosts might turn on them, Mrs. Lederman said. But while there, she was taken in as a daughter by the Lederman family, a refugee family whose sons she had previously met in a study group. Mrs. Lederman persevered and was reunited with her father after American forces liberated the Buchenwald, Germany, concentration camp in 1945. She later married one of the Leberman's sons, Ezjel Leberman. He became a doctor and the two immigrated to the United States. Mrs. Lederman said she tells her story to anyone who will listen, and speaks to middle and high school students about her experience. When a student recently asked what it was about her that enabled her to survive those awful years she said her late husband used to say"'There is a little hormone called hope.'" Master Sgt. Janna Manning, 43rd Mission Support Squadron, an African American woman raised in the Jewish faith, said what struck her most about the speech was how on a daily basis people complain about the little things they have to go through. "I couldn't imagine going through six years of what she had to endure," Sergeant Manning said. She said the speech also reminded her of the underground railroad established during the slavery years in this country. "The more we think we're different from one another the more we actually have in common."