At the age of 14, Yetta Bergstein fled Russian- and German-occupied Poland to the United States.

The years leading up to her escape are filled with memories of hiding in dusty attics and dark basements, fleeing Russian and German soldiers who had invaded her country and began persecuting European Jews.

Nearly 30 years ago, Bergstein and her late husband, Ben Bergstein, were both interviewed as part of Steven Spielberg’s research for his epic historical drama, “Schindler’s List.”

Last month, teacher at St. John’s XXIII Catholic School in Scottsdale, Jerry Fitzpatrick, visited Bergstein in her home to record an exclusive interview for use in his current and future classrooms.

As an educator, Fitzpatrick believes students today can benefit from hearing Bergstein’s story to help keep the memory of the Holocaust alive.

“(Students) read all this stuff in books and to them, it may sound just like a story, but to actually be able to see someone who was there is amazing,” Fitzpatrick said.

First-hand account

“I am living despite Hitler once and Stalin twice,” Bergstein said, who managed to evade being captured as a young girl growing up in the small village of Podlipce in northwestern Poland. Bergstein took care of her two-year-old sister while her mother and aunt worked as cooks in German-run labor camps. Their cooking skills were valued by the soldiers, who were given liberties that the prisoners did not have. In Podlipce, Bergstein said they were one of three known Jewish families in that town.

During the day, Bergstein was told to stay indoors and keep out of sight. At night, she would take to the streets, hide in the shadows and rummage for food in trash cans.

In the summer, Bergstein and her family hid in the forests or cornfields. To keep from freezing in the wintertime, they would stay in the homes of friends and strangers alike, all of whom were Ukrainian.

“When you’re scared to death, you don’t feel anything,” she said, recalling the harsh Polish winters. “In those days, even living wasn’t easy.”

In one harrowing account, Bergstein’s mother and aunt were told by a few gracious Russian soldiers to not return to the concentration camp because they were going to “liquidate the camp tomorrow.” The women went home to gather their items and fled to the forest that night.

Lost in translation

Bergstein had one close call of being captured when she returned from town and was spotted by a Polish man who, knowing she was Jewish, began yelling in Polish to the German soldiers nearby to capture her. Thankfully for Bergstein, the Germans didn’t understand Polish and she was already sprinting back into the forest. When she came upon the camp where her family had been hiding, they were nowhere to be found. In desperation, she called out for her mother and kept on running.

“I thought they were all killed so I kept running and calling, ‘Mom! Mom! Mom!’ for at least a mile and all of a sudden, somebody grabs my mouth and I thought, ‘That’s it.’”

It was Bergstein’s father who had grabbed her, covered her mouth and said, “What are you trying to do, kill us all?” Unbeknown to her, the Germans had begun shooting into the trees. Her family was forced to leave their campsite and flee deeper into the forest.

Once she and her family relocated to the United States, Bergstein was safe from the devastation of war but her mind took time to calibrate.

“I had such terrible nightmares,” she said. “Once the nightmares stopped, I started getting migraine headaches…sometimes I had to go home from high school.”

Bergstein met her husband in New York in 1948. They lived on the East Coast before moving to Fountain Hills in 1986.

Once she moved to the U.S., Bergstein said she never dealt with antisemitism again, but such was not the case for her daughter, who came home crying one day from school. Bergstein asked her what was wrong, to which her daughter explained that a girl had called her a dirty Jew.

“She said, ‘I’m not crying because she called me a dirty Jew, I’m crying because she was the dirty one,’” Bergstein said.

An elementary school teacher, Fitzpatrick is also a graduate student at Arizona State University studying World War II studies. He learned of Bergstein’s story through his barber, Daniel Margolis, owner of the Fountain Hills Barber Shop. Margolis introduced the two and Bergstein agreed to tell her story for use in a classroom setting.

“My desire as an educator would be to continue informing students of the reality of the Holocaust,” Fitzpatrick said. “Here we have someone who has lived it and can talk about it and tell us the horrors and the harsh realities of it. I think it’s important that it doesn’t get lost to history.”