National Anthem: ‘What Freedom is About’

“If I lived through the concentration camp, it couldn’t be that bad,” Hermina Hirsch said she told herself of fulfilling a lifelong dream of hers.

[lz_third_party includes=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRkLSFROC9E”]

Hirsch, 89 years old and a resident of Southfield, Michigan, triumphantly performed the national anthem this weekend before a Detroit Tigers Major League Baseball game, something she has long wanted to do. She sang before the Tigers took on the Tampa Bay Rays in Comerica Park.

During the dark days of the 1940s in Eastern Europe, Hirsch and her family were sent to live in a ghetto in Czechoslovakia in 1944. Later, they were imprisoned by the Nazis in a variety of World War II concentration camps. She was 17 when she was taken from her home.

Hirsch, her parents, and her siblings were ripped apart from each other as she was sent from camp to camp in Germany and Poland, including the largest and most notorious of the Nazi death camps, Auschwitz, radio station WWJ reported.

Hirsch lost her parents, three brothers, and many of her aunts and uncles at these camps.

The last camp where Hirsch was imprisoned was liberated on Jan. 21, 1945. Once free again, Hirsch made her way back to her birthplace of Kosice, in what was once Czechoslovakia (now part of Slovakia). She was born in 1927, one of nine children in her family.

Today, this Holocaust survivor is 89, while her husband is 96.

Her granddaughter, Andrea Hirsch, told WWJ that after a year of fighting to regain her health, she was set up on a blind date with Bernard Hirsch, her now husband of 69 years. Today she is 89; he is 96. The couple moved to the Detroit area in 1953 and are longtime Tigers fans, according to Patch.com.

“At my age, I figure this would do it,” Hirsch told WWJ earlier about her “national anthem” dream. “I don’t want to die before I sing at a baseball game.”

Before her Major League performance, Hirsch had been practicing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in front of friends and family. All that practice, and a dream she held onto, finally paid off.