Emmaly Reed: Holocaust Survivor Speaks at WCHS

On April 4th WCHS had a very special guest speaker. Her name is Emmaly Reed and she is a Holocaust survivor who spoke about her horrifying memories and experiences in many different death and concentration camps.

Her and her family were brought into the camps when she was only three years old. Her family was separated, and unfortunately she had to see Hitler personally tie and burn her father at the stake.

The next 12 years of Reed’s life were very difficult, being in numerous different concentration camps and being transported there in squished cattle cars. Reed became a Christian when she was three years old because of the influence the Catholics and Protestants had on her. She was housed in the Jewish barracks but every night she snuck to the Christians’ barracks and they would provide her with sanitary food to eat such as baked potato, piece of tomato, or she resorted to eating different flowers and grasses.

“If you know an animal can eat it and not die, it won’t kill you,” said Reed.

After she was freed she had to be spoon fed because her body couldn’t handle whole foods. The Nazis performed many experiments on numerous people in the camps, and she was chosen several times. The doctors took a really long nail, a finger width wide and nailed it into the top of her head to see how far it would go down in her body and the effect it had. Sometimes she still remembers the feeling of the nail going into her head and coming back out.

When the camp was liberated, the guards fled, leaving all the survivors hanging on the walls of buildings by chains around their necks. If they moved at all, they would choke themselves to death. There were about 25 percent left on the walls that were alive and Reed was among them, however she was unconscious and left in a coma. Reed was freed from the camp at age fifteen weighing just 32 pounds.

As Reed looks back at the Holocaust her relationship with Christ has helped her learn to forgive all the Nazis who did this to the Jews.

“If you hate somebody and do some trickery to them, then it backfires and hits you when you don’t look,” said Reed. “You can only overcome if you forgive.”

