NEVER FORGETTING HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR RELATES HER EXPERIENCES TO STUDENTS.

Byline: Mark Kellam Valley News Writer

Tovah Cohen was 12 years old when German troops invaded Poland and her life turned upside down. She survived the Holocaust, enduring beatings and starvation in concentration camps. However, her father, mother and two brothers were not so fortunate.

Many children today don't hear firsthand the horrific treatment the Jews suffered during World War II. Many may see it dramatized in movies, but students at Our Lady of the Valley School in Canoga Park heard about the persecution of Jews during World War II from 79-year-old Cohen- someone who lived through it.

During her visit to the school, the students watched a videotaped interview with Cohen where she talked about her experiences during the Holocaust. The students then got to talk to Cohen directly.

Cohen, a Woodland Hills resident, said the discrimination she and other Jews experienced started immediately after the invasion, but not to the extent they would encounter a few years later. She came from a middle-class family. Her father, Moses, owned a dairy store with his father in the town of Krakow, Poland. The only discrimination they'd experienced before the invasion came when her father was attacked by a group of anti-Semitic Polish students. He fended them off, Cohen said.

Her father was a Zionist and, with a friend, he tried to make it to Palestine, which would later become Israel. Knowing he couldn't afford to bring his entire family to the Holy Land, he decided he would go first and send for his wife, Marla, and their three children later.

Cohen's father and his friend made it only to Iraq, however, and they were put in prison. Once Poland was invaded, he was released from prison and required to join the Polish Army, fighting the Germans, Cohen said.

Meanwhile, life was changing for Cohen and her family. They were initially sent to live in a small village outside Krakow. The Germans took the family store, leaving Cohen and her relatives with little money.

The discrimination became more blatant. Jews were not allowed to walk on the sidewalks; they had to walk on the street. They were required to wear yellow stars and children weren't allowed to attend school.

By this time, Cohen's father had returned to Krakow after the defeat of the Polish army. They all lived in the cellar of a small house. Their only heat source was a small stove in the middle of the room.

However, their lives were still better than what awaited.

In 1940, Jews were moved to ghettos. ``We were 16 people in one room,'' she recalled. Some of the people in the room were her relatives, some were strangers.

Cohen and 29 other girls were taken from the village to clean the barracks where Hitler youth were housed. If the girls didn't work hard enough or disobeyed orders, they were beaten with nightsticks, Cohen said. One day the German officers lined up the girls. ``They said, `whoever can show us the most (black and) blue marks on their bodies will receive extra bread,''' Cohen said.

Meanwhile in the ghetto, life was growing increasingly difficult. Beatings - and worse - were commonplace. ``They would murder someone right in front of you,'' Cohen said.

However, there were glimmers of compassion, too.

One day, the Germans called all village residents out and demanded to see everyone's papers. Cohen's father was distraught because his daughter didn't have her papers. There was one particularly gruff German officer leading the search effort. Cohen's father knew that if they found out she didn't have her papers, she would be separated from her family. Others in the village told Cohen's father to remain silent, but he decided to confront the problem head-on.

He walked up to the volatile German officer and explained that his daughter didn't have her papers. The German officer reached in his back pocket. ``Everyone thought he was going to pull out a gun and shoot my father,'' Cohen said. However, the officer pulled out a set of papers for Cohen and she remained with her family.

In 1943, Cohen's father and older brother, Naseik, were taken away and she never saw them again.

Then, one day, she returned from cleaning the barracks and was devastated by what she saw. ``The ghetto was almost empty,'' Cohen said, tears welling up in her eyes. ``There were many dead bodies in the streets.''

Her mother and younger brother, Salek, were gone, never to be seen again.

Shortly after that, Cohen, a friend and one of Cohen's aunts were sent to a concentration camp called Plashow.

``At the camp, we had to walk all the time or we were beaten,'' Cohen said.

She took a job at a factory that made electrical wire. She recalled the time when three of her friends returned home late from work. They were hanged. It took three ties to hang one of the girls - the noose slipped each time. She was then shot to death. ``They would not let her live,'' Cohen said.

Cohen said her rebellious nature meant she was punished often - sometimes beaten, sometimes placed in solitary confinement, sometimes given extra work.

On one occasion, she and two other women were told they were to receive 25 lashings with a whip. One of the women was older and the other was emotionally frail. Cohen asked to be whipped first. ``I didn't scream (during the whipping,)'' she said, adding that her strength helped the other two women face more bravely what was about to happen to them.

When the Germans began to realize they were losing the war, they forced everyone held in the concentration camps to dig up the mass graves where those who had been murdered earlier were buried.

``They pulled out their gold teeth, if they had them, and the bodies were burned,'' Cohen said, adding that the Germans didn't want to leave behind any evidence of the atrocities that had occurred there.

In the winter of 1944, Cohen and her aunt and her friend were sent to Auschwitz. At the camp, they were stripped, searched and their heads were shaved. One of the few items she still had was a locket with the picture of her father, mother and younger brother inside. To make sure the locket wouldn't be taken away, she swallowed it. She still wears it around her neck today.

They were forced to stand naked in the cold for 24 hours. Finally, they were given uniforms and placed in barracks with bunks constructed to hold 10 to 12 people.

While at Auschwitz, Cohen got a job in an airplane factory. Fearing being bombed, the German soldiers at the factory would flee to shelters located in mountains about five miles away. They forced the Jewish workers to march with them through the bitter cold and snow.

One time, a friend of Cohen's lost her shoes. Rather than let her friend suffer frostbite,Cohen carried her friend to the bomb shelter. But Cohen paid a price; she got bronchitis from her exertion in the severe cold.

Eventually, several of the Jewish prisoners, including Cohen, were sent on a death march. ``We walked for days,'' Cohen said. By this time, she was struggling not only with bronchitis, but also a painful, infected finger.

During the march, British forces came upon them. In that unexpected moment, they were liberated. Cohen weighed less than 70 pounds and it was feared she wouldn't live.

But she survived. A few years later, Cohen met her future husband, Mosze Weissman, and they began a life together raising two sons. Cohen now has four grandchildren and is expecting a great-grandchild soon.

Cohen speaks at many area schools and says she wants the world to always remember how Jewish people suffered under Hitler's reign of terror.

``It's important for me to talk about it because there are so many (Jews) who don't want to talk about it,'' she said. She has three sisters-in-law still living and none of them wants to recall their experiences in concentration camps.

``It is sometimes hard because you have to remember everything that happened to you,'' Cohen said, adding, ``but it's our history.''

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(color) After Tovah Cohen (center) shared her story about surviving the Holocaust, Lauren Brose (left) and Shantelle Keister, both eighth-graders at Our Lady of the Valley School, share a lighter moment with the 79-year-old.