When the Karp family immigrated to the United States after surviving the horrors of the Holocaust, they quickly learned that their new neighbors in Iowa did not want to hear about what happened to them.
Even broaching the subject of the war and what they as Jews experienced was met with gasps and nervous giggles. It was clear: people did not understand what they went through, and they weren’t interested in learning.
For Celina, the teenaged daughter of Phyllis and Irvin Karp, the reactions were enough to deter her from talking about it for most of her life. That was until a 1993 movie by Steven Spielberg came out called Schindler’s List.
“Oskar Schindler gave me my life, but Steven Spielberg gave me my voice.”Celina Karp Biniaz, Holocaust survivor
Celina saw that millions of people were now able to witness some of the brutalities she and her family suffered. They could finally begin to understand. And just the same, they would know the story of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved their lives, and hundreds more, from Nazi concentration camps.
To Celina, a wife and mother by this time, Spielberg's movie gave her permission to open up and share her story. As she put it, “Oskar Schindler gave me my life, but Steven Spielberg gave me my voice.”
She would go on to share her story with audiences around the world and in a biography, Saved by Schindler: The Life of Celina Karp Biniaz, written by William Friedricks. Celina Karp Biniaz and Friedricks spoke with Talk of Iowa host Charity Nebbe in 2017 and 2022, respectively.
IPR is revisiting those conversations in remembrance of the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day and Celina’s liberation.
Face to face with the ‘angel of death’
Part of Celina’s story included the time she came face to face with the notoriously wicked Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the “angel of death.”
It was toward the end of the war when she and her mother were sent to Auschwitz. On this day, they were separated; Phyllis went to the kitchen to peel potatoes, and Celina was taken to the barracks. There, she was told to strip down and line up with other young women to be examined by Mengele.
By this time, his inhumane experiments were known, as were his sorting methods: a pencil to the right meant you live; a pencil to the left meant you die.
As an early adolescent who had been living in either a German ghetto or forced labor camp for several years, Celina was very thin and underdeveloped. When the doctor came up to her, he pointed his pencil to the left. Death.
After he was finished sorting, Mengele came back to the people in the left group. That’s when something came over Celina that likely saved her life.
“Honestly, I don't know what prompted me to say to him, in German, three words. I said: lassen sie mich [gehen], which means, ‘let me go.’ He looked at me, and the pencil went to the right. And believe me, I ran. I picked up my clothes, and, crying hysterically — really, because at that point, our emotions were at the very top — I ran out naked into the snow,” Celina said.
The ABCs of growing up in a German-occupied ghetto
Celina recalls the exact day the Germans invaded Poland: September 1, 1939. She was 8 years old and had just finished second grade. It was impossible to know at the time, but that would be the last schooling she would receive for the next six years.
Soon after the Nazi invasion, her family was forced into a ghetto, where they lived for roughly two years.
At the age of 10, instead of entering fourth grade, Celina was entering the workforce. At first, she helped make brushes and lick envelopes with other children in the ghetto. But as liquidations made the ghetto’s population smaller and circumstances more dangerous, her parents decided that she would be safer coming to work with them in the sewing factory.
Being just 10 years old, Celina was too young to work. But they were able to alter her papers, increasing her age to 12. That way, she would appear old enough to leave the ghetto and work — something she says saved her life.
“I remember seeing the brutality,” Celina said. “Some of the German soldiers would pick up babies and smash their heads against the walls. It was just — it was just awful.”
She said it was at this point that Schindler, who had witnessed these atrocities, decided he was going to try to save the workers.
Saved by Schindler and surviving Auschwitz
After the sewing factory was moved inside a forced labor camp, Celina and her parents lived in relative safety. The factory was run by Julius Madritsch, who Celina described as “an excellent human being” for the way he treated the workers. He was also a good friend of Schindler’s and helped provide names for a list Schindler was assembling.
At the time, the Germans were getting ready to liquidate the camp, which meant everyone’s lives were at stake. That’s when, according to Celina, Schindler began collecting names of Jewish workers who he was going to bring to his new munitions factory.
“He said to Madritsch, ‘All right, give me some of your people, and I'll put them on the list,’ which is what Madritsch did,” Celina said. “And that's how my family — because my parents worked so closely with him in running the factory and keeping the accounts, etc. — we were put on the list. And that's how we ended up in Schindler’s factory in Czechoslovakia.”
But before Celina and her mother were able to find sanctuary in Schindler’s factory, they were forced to confront the most horrific place imaginable: Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In a detour that was unknown to them, the women on Schindler’s list were sent to Auschwitz instead of Czechoslovakia. As Celina recalls, they arrived in the middle of the night, and plumes of smoke and fire illuminated the sky. She remembers barking dogs and German soldiers shouting at them to get out of the boxcars.
“And then we were marched into a shower, and the door was closed. We could all look up and see that there were outlets. We were only hoping — we were wondering — are we going to get the gas? Or are we going to get showers? So that was a moment of incredible fear,” she said. “You can't imagine the relief, even though we were in Auschwitz, the relief when the water finally came down.”
It wasn’t until about six weeks later — and her terrifying encounter with Mengele — that she and her mother and the rest of the women on Schindler’s list were able to leave the camp.
Celina was marching with the other women to get their numbers tattooed on their arms when they were told to change direction. Suddenly, they were being shoved into boxcars. Schindler had managed to bribe the commandant of the camp for their release.
A day and a half later, the women arrived at the factory in Brünnlitz and were reunited with the men from their group.
Life after the war: finding a teacher, becoming a teacher
After a cold and hungry winter, the Jewish workers saved by Schindler were liberated the day following Victory in Europe Day. It was May 9, 1945, when Celina, her mother Phyllis and her father Irvin were able to walk free back to their homeland of Kraków, Poland.
Celina was almost 14 years old by then and had not held a pencil in her hand for all those years. She decided to get a tutor and catch up on her education. It was that tutor, a 90-year-old German nun, who she credits with changing her outlook on life.
“She, in her way — gentle way — and total acceptance of me in teaching me German and English, showed me a way to work through my anger and bitterness. [She] taught me that hatred is corrosive and that the only way you can move forward is to work through your anger and hatred,” Celina recalled.
After living in Germany for two years, the Karp family moved to Des Moines. There, Celina graduated from North High School and went on to attend Grinnell College. She later became a teacher and eventually began to tell her story and the important lesson she learned from her German mentor.
“That is why I speak to young people. I have an incredible faith in young people. They are so much more accepting of diversity. They are forward-looking," she said. “You have to be taught to hate. So that's what I'm working on, trying to tell people, ‘Do not teach hatred.’”
Celina is currently 93 years old and lives in California. She has traveled back to Iowa over the years to share her story with younger generations.
This story is sourced from a 2017 interview between Talk of Iowa host Charity Nebbe and Celina Karp Biniaz, as well as a 2022 interview with Bill Friedricks. Listen to the full conversation.
