ATLANTA — It’s been more than 80 years since George Rishfeld’s parents threw him over a barbed-wire fence into the waiting arms of a Christian family, in hopes he would be safe from Nazi soldiers.
“I feel blessed because I feel I was the golden child, so to speak,” he said. “A million and a half children were murdered, and I wasn’t one of them.”
When he was three years old, he escaped with his family from their home in Warsaw, Poland, to Russia-occupied Vilna.
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Then the Germans seized the city, forcing the family to live in a ghetto.
To prevent the Nazis from capturing the child, Rishfeld’s parents hurled him over the fence.
Rishfeld lived in safety with the rescuing family for three years. His parents survived and they were reunited three years later.
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Rishfeld was among six Holocaust survivors who shared their stories at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony Sunday at the Memorial to the Six Million monument at Greenwood Cemetery in southwest Atlanta.
The monument commemorates the six million Jews slaughtered by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s.
“My parents made a decision that no matter what happens to them, they’re going to save me,” he said. “As it happens, they both survived.”
Now 87, Rishfeld, who lives in Atlanta, tells his story at ceremonies and schools across the country. It’s especially important these days to educate people about the Holocaust because of what he sees as a surge of antisemitism around the world.
“Antisemitism will never be gone, it goes back to the Romans,” he said. “But we’ve got to lower the flame. We have to get it under control, and that’s my goal. I feel I was saved not only to do that, but to tell the story. Because the story will tell you a story of survival, resilience and so on. It tells you what my parents did, and that has to be told.”
The Memorial to the Six Million was designed by a Holocaust survivor 61 years ago after a group of locals recognized a need to have a place to honor their loved ones murdered by the Nazis.
Rishfeld said the stories from one of the greatest atrocities of “I share this story because we have to prevent it from ever happening again, such a mass organized Holocaust.”
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