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Miriam Golomb had fainted from hunger and been dragged out of the way to die when she was roused by cheering and laughter.
Struggling to peer around a doorway, she saw Soviet soldiers liberating the German aircraft-parts factory where she and other Polish Jews had been forced to work in the last stages of the war.
After surviving five years in a Nazi-held ghetto in her hometown of Lodz and several months at the Auschwitz concentration camp, she was "living dead and left to starve" when the Soviets arrived.
Now 75 years old, Miriam Golomb Grossman of Omaha was a 23-year-old nurse in Lodz when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939.
With limited food and medical supplies, no heat and several families packed into a room, many died daily of starvation, she said. Others were plucked from food lines and shipped to concentration camps, notably the notorious Auschwitz.
In late 1944, the Nazis took the surviving Jews in railroad cattle cars to Auschwitz. "It is unimaginable what happened there," Mrs. Grossman said.
On arriving at the death camp, the Jews were ordered to strip and their heads were shaved. They were sent to showers, given one garment and housed in animal stalls to wait their turns to be executed in the gas chambers.
Before her turn came, however, Mrs. Grossman said she was selected in a nude lineup before Dr. Josef Mengele - nicknamed the Angel of Death by survivors - to be sent to the German factory on the Czechoslovakian border. Those not selected for the factory work were sent to their deaths.
About 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis during the war.
Mrs. Grossman spent the first three years after the war in a displaced persons camp in Austria, where she met Ignac Grossman, a Czech machinist. They were married in 1947. In 1948, their son, Alex, was born and in 1949 the family immigrated to the United States. Her husband died a few years ago. Her son and his wife, Mary, live in Omaha and have three children.
"It's so hard to remember this," she said of the years under the Nazis. "If not for the benefit of future generations I wouldn't do it."
Mrs. Grossman said she and her husband worked hard in Omaha to build a new life.
"We expected little," she said. "Some people come to America and expect America to give them what they want. We understood that you work for what you want."
Twice a week, Mrs. Grossman meets with a small group of Russian Jews to teach them English. She purposely decided not to work as a nurse in her new land.
"I knew that others could be nurses," she said. "I wanted to be a mother."
Stephen Allard, a World-Herald research specialist, assisted with this article.