LOS ANGELES – It was a touching moment as 82-year-old Matilda Pardo walked onto the stage of the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance. Cloaked in complete black besides the rose-covered shawl, and the pin of the American flag, she stepped to the center of the stage and gently commanded the attention of the whole audience.
One could never comprehend how a person could live each day and retell their own experiences during the Holocaust, but Matilda Pardo does it. When asked why, she simply responded that she does this “to educate people.”
During October of 1940, Italy attacked Greece due to an agreement that Italy would hold Greece for Hitler, and then Hitler attacked Greece and took over.
Pardo described the conditions and the horror she felt to see her city under Nazi control.
“They closed all the stores, and they say if we are in the street, they would have to kill us. They went to the hospital, and they took all the Jewish people out who went there to give birth, and people that were not able to walk, they took them on stretchers.”
The Germans then took the 1,900 Jewish people in the city of Ioannina and drove them to the city of Salonika, where the conditions would only get worse.
“In Salonika, the place where we stay was not for people, it was for animals. It was nothing we could do…we just didn’t know,” said Pardo with a deep sigh of hopelessness.
It was here that Pardo suffered the greatest loss of all. On the eighth day her mother suffered a stroke, but “no one could help her,” she said.
Her mother later died. The officers were ordered to take her mother away. She and her family were not allowed to see her buried.
“My older brother took a piece of wood and put her name on it. We begged those who buried her to put it there, but they wouldn’t. We were crying, shaking and hungry.”
The remaining family was forced to leave and get in trains where “there were no windows, no room to breathe.”
The next stop for Pardo and her family was the infamous death camp known as Auschwitz. After arrival, she noticed that they were separating people by the able workers, and the nonworkers, and due to the advice of a woman behind her, her life was saved. She said she could work because those who were not able to work were killed.
Pardo was then taken with other women to have her head shaved. Guards led them to the showers where they were given soap.
“Please remember, the soap they give us was from the ashes from the people in the crematorium. I learned that, and I was hurt so very deeply.”
Conditions only worsened. Each bed in the barracks, which were made for three, was stacked with six frail people. During the night, rats would come and roam on their heads, she said.
One day while walking, Pardo saw a pile of dead bodies, and she began to cry.
“They were dead with their eyes open. It was such a horrible thing for human beings to be treated like that.”
For six months, Pardo was taken to work in an ammunition factory. From long hours of strenuous labor and malnutrition, her legs swelled up and her stomach grew fat. With such a large stomach, suspicions grew among the Germans that she might be pregnant. She was examined and “they stuck needles into me. I was bleeding, and I don’t understand why they did that.”
When German soldiers were about to give a poisonous soup to the people of the concentration camp, the Allies came to free the camp. Pardo was finally able to see a family member.
“I was so happy to see him, my brother,” Pardo said.
Once she was finally liberated, she and her brother went back to their hometown of Ioannina in Greece only to find more heartache and despair.
Not only had a new family come and moved into their house, but their mother’s burial place was unknown.
Pardo did later marry, but said she is still haunted by the images of dead bodies and crematoriums.
For those who believe the Holocaust never happened, she said,” It’s true, I was there, and I am here. God let me live and I want the world to know.”