Safety meant always hiding
The Nazis gave Bea Karp's mother a horrid choice: Keep her two daughters with her in a miserable internment camp: or sign them off to the care of strangers on the outside.
She signed, likely the only thing that kept the young girls from perishing with their parents at Auschwitz.
"That she managed to have the strength to let us go, I don't know how she did it,'' the 72-year-old Omahan said. "But it was because of my mother I'm here.''
Born in Germany in 1932, Bea was introduced early on to the ugly face of anti-Semitism: the same hatred that would drive the Germans to try to extinguish the Jews. Some of her earliest memories are of other kids throwing stones and calling her a "dirty Jew.''
In 1940, the Gestapo barged in and ordered the family to pack and ask no questions. They were being deported to an internment camp in France.
In the camp, their father was separated. There was little food, even for guards, which was why the Nazis decided to allow the children to be released to an outside relief organization that had gone underground.
Bea's mother at first only begrudgingly released Bea's younger sister. But she ultimately signed both girls away. Bea still remembers that final look at her gaunt, devastated mother.
The girls moved to a big, empty chateau in France. Bea got new ID papers changing her name from Beate to Beatrice to give her a French identity. She was moved: 14 times: to different safe houses, finally winding up at a Catholic convent.
After the war, the girls emigrated to New York to be raised by relatives. Bea's husband's work eventually brought her to Nebraska.
With a mixed German-French accent, she frequently has spoken in schools about the millions of innocents who lost their lives.
"The Holocaust should never, ever be forgotten.''
