In 1951, the Israeli Parliament selected the 27th day of the month of Nissan in the Jewish calendar for a new holiday, Yom Hashoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day. While few may realize that today is Yom Hashoah, there are many people who do not need a designated day to remember the Holocaust.

Vera Federman is one of those people. Federman is a survivor.

Fifty-nine years ago, Federman was Vera Frank, a normal 19-year-old Jewish woman living in Debrecen, Hungary. At the time, Hungary was still part of the Axis, but Federman and her family were aware that the Allies were going to win the war and held out hope that it would end soon. Then, on March 20, 1944, Germany invaded Hungary and the Franks were forced into the ghetto with all the other Jews.

“We went to the ghetto, and then from the ghetto to the brick factory, where they had a single railroad track, and three transports from Debrecen and the surrounding countryside — about 12,000 Jews,” Federman said, recalling the time between Hitler’s invasion and her relocation to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

During their time in the ghetto, the Franks worked in the brick factory and listened to war coverage on the radio. They heard about the Normandy invasion on D-Day while in the factory, and hoped the war would be over before they could be moved.

On Federman’s 20th birthday, June 27, 1944, she and her parents were herded onto one of the transports and spent the next three days traveling to Auschwitz.

“We arrived [at] Auschwitz, and they separated the men from the women, and my father went with the men, and my mother and I arrived in front of an S.S. officer,” Federman said.

The officer ordered Federman and her mother in different directions, despite Federman’s claim that she was only 13 years old. She never saw either of her parents again.

Federman stayed in Auschwitz for six or seven weeks, and saw her health and that of others rapidly deteriorate.

“Girls came down with scarlet fever, and my cousin, with whom I came, became ill with scarlet fever, but she was so lucky, because up to that time, [the Nazis] took [sick people] immediately, and took them to the gas chamber,” she said.

After several weeks, Federman and her two friends, Vera and Zsuzsi, were marched in front of Dr. Josef Mengele, the camp’s human-genetics researcher, so he could decide which women would be sent to other labor camps, and which would be killed. Federman and Vera were rejected, while Zsuzsi was chosen to go to a labor camp.

Zsuzsi insisted that her sister come with her, and after some questioning by Mengele about whether they were twins, he approved Vera. Federman tried to convince Mengele to approve her as well, but he rejected her again.

“I said, ‘Oh, but I am very strong, I can work.’ And a German officer standing next to him whispered, kind of a loud whisper, ‘Lassen sie das kleine gehen’ — ‘Let the little one go,’ and he let me go,” she said.

The women were taken to Allendorf, Germany, to a camp that had just been emptied of French prisoners of war. They were to work in a munitions factory, but Zsuzsi managed to get the three women jobs as potato-peelers, which meant they could get far more food than the meager rations the Germans gave them.

Federman and the others were imprisoned in Allendorf until the end of March 1945. The Germans called all the prisoners back from their normal jobs, and took them on a march.

“At that point, we should have known that the Americans were nearby, but we were so scared of the Germans, we were so sure that they would get us in the end,” Federman said. “But we marched all night long, about 30 kilometers, and then, the next day, they put us in a meadow.”

After three days of marching, the Germans left them.

“The Germans said, ‘We are so sorry, we have to leave you now, but if you want to come with us, tell us,’” Federman said. “We thought they must be crazy if they thought we were going to follow them.”

The former prisoners broke into groups and hid overnight. The next day, starving, they ventured into the nearest town, only to see white sheets hanging from people’s windows.

Federman and the rest of her group approached a house and begged to the woman for food, receiving homemade bread. A few minutes later, the woman looked out the window and told the women there was a U.S. tank outside.

“All I can say is we fell in love with all those people. They were kind; they didn’t threaten you with anything. So that was our liberation,” Federman said.

Over the next year, Federman and her friends traveled home to Debrecen, then went back to Germany and got jobs working for the U.S. Joint Distribution Committee.

Then, one day in May 1946, Federman got a letter from Hillel, the foundation for Jewish campus life, with a request for young, English-speaking Holocaust survivors with high-school diplomas to be sent to school in the United States.

“I received a scholarship to the UW,” Federman recalled. “Nobody was able to tell me where the UW was. I remember somebody said, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s in St. Louis.’”

It took more than a year and a half from the day she received the letter until she got a student visa, but she finally came to Seattle in February 1948. Federman stayed with Alpha Epsilon Phi, a Jewish sorority that was on campus at the time and began school at the UW in March.

The adjustment to college was somewhat awkward at first.

“I was 23 years old, and some of them were 18,” Federman said. “They had to have quiet study hours between 7 and 9 in the evening, but I didn’t understand why they had to be told to be quiet.”

Federman met her husband, Marvin Federman, on a ski trip she went on with some of her friends.

“He was sitting next to me in the car, and he said, ‘Yes, I was in Germany and France; I was there for a year,’ and I really got interested,” Federman said. “I wanted to talk to him about where he had been in Europe.”

Marvin, Federman learned, had been a soldier in the U.S. military.

The couple began dating soon afterward and got married in 1949. Federman had completed enough credits to graduate from the UW in 1951 with a double major in history and Romance languages, but found out that she was half a credit short on a high-school English requirement and dropped out.

Federman had two children — her son, Murray, was born in 1955, and her daughter, Judi, was born in 1958. In 1969, Federman decided to return to the UW to complete her work and finally receive her degree, only to learn the requirements had changed and she could receive it without additional courses.

Today, Federman works as an accountant for her husband’s business, and with the Washington state Holocaust Education Center to put together exhibits based on other survivors’ stories. Although an atheist, she remains active in the Jewish community to ensure that her story, and those of others, will be remembered.