Dental/Medical Aid

Shaindel is a survivor in every sense of the word. Born in Satmar, Hungary to a Satmar Hassidic family, Shaindel spent a year in the ghetto before boarding a train to Auschwitz with her older and younger sister, mother aunt and cousins. Her father had already been sent to Siberia earlier. Shaindel was three and a half years old when her Auschwitz ordeal began. Upon disembarking from the train, Shaindel’s aunt took her baby sister along with her own children, and they were immediately sent to the gas chambers. A man told her mother to say that Shaindel and her sister, who was a year older than her, were twins. When she turned around to ask him why, there was no one in sight. She obeyed this advice, however, believing that an angel had interceded on their behalf. As a result, Shaindel and her sister were sent to Dr. Mengel’s laboratory. Her mother was assigned to kitchen duty and she would literally crawl in the dirt to their bunk to sneak them whatever crumbs or potato peels she could find. For the entire year, blood was drawn from Shaindel’s frail arm daily. The lab technicians told Mengele that while they were sisters, they were not twins, but Dr. Mengel begged to differ and kept them in the twins’ area for future experimentation. As the war was reaching an end, before he had a chance to experiment on them, Mengele ushered all those who remained alive into the gas chambers. After fifteen minutes the doors reopened, Mengele appeared, and barked that there was a malfunction so the gas didn’t spew out that time, but the end is near as it is only a matter of minutes before the problem would be fixed. The doors were closed again. At that exact moment Russian bomber planes flew overhead causing all the Nazis to flee, and those who were sentenced to death were freed. Shaindel, her mother and sister had miraculously survived Auschwitz. After the war, Shaindel’s mother, an accomplished seamstress, gathered all of the orphan girls and single-handedly brought them back to life and prepared them for living. With limitless love and warmth, she taught them to sew; she taught them about faith and Judaism; she gave them a new life. The family didn’t know if their father had survived in Siberia but transports did occasionally return from that area. They always asked those who came back if they knew about his whereabouts, and they were informed that he was on his way. Imagine the shock when a clean shaven, Russian soldier entered their home and presented himself as their father. Over time, Shaindel’s mom’s love and support helped him to return to his roots as well, and he ultimately served as the spiritual advisor in the orphaned girls’ institution. Shaindel eventually married, and had eleven children. One of her sons drowned when he was eighteen years old. She is now the matriarchal head of a five-generation family whose numbers she has lost track of. As a true survivor, she proudly points out that this is her revenge on Hitler. Referred by Welfare Services, the eighty-year-old Shaindel Deutsch came to DVI accompanied by her daughter. Her original dentures are old and broken and she is in desperate new of new ones which she will be getting shortly. She had resigned herself to living with the pain and difficulty in eating because she could not afford a new set of dentures and was delighted to learn from her social worker that the free dentures program in DVI exists. Mrs. Deutsch and her daughter could not adequately express their appreciation and gratitude and repeatedly told us how ‘they feel the warm embrace of all those who work here – what a blessing!”