Deborah Fineblum
JNS, Jan. 22, 2025
“Survivors went about starting new lives with their bare hands. At the end of the day, faced with so much betrayal, loss and death, the survivors chose life.”
David Frankel was 8 on the cold December night in 1944 when his mother told him to run quickly from her bunk in the women’s section of Bergen-Belsen to his father across the camp. She had good news to share: The Germans had offered to trade more than 1,000 Jewish prisoners for German prisoners being held by the Allies.
His mother was something of a hero in the camp, he also recalls, saving young lives with her breastmilk. “We were on a starvation diet, but when they found out she still somehow had milk for my baby brother, the other mothers came to plead with her to save their babies’ lives.” So every morning, she sent the youngster to the other mothers with cups of milk she had expressed.
Rena Quint was a year older than Frankel when she was liberated from Bergen-Belsen the following April. “I remember lying outside with a high fever since I had both diphtheria and typhus, and I was surrounded by dead bodies,” says the Polish-born Quint, a memory sharp in its feelings and smells despite eight decades that have passed. “Suddenly, there were men in different uniforms—they turned out to be the British—speaking a different language, and they were telling us ‘Go home!’”
But that turned out to be easier said than done.
Less than three months before Jews worldwide celebrate their freedom from Egyptian slavery during the holiday of Passover, the idea of being free—and its costs—is on everyone’s minds with the release of three women hostages on Jan. 19 who were held captive by Hamas in the Gaza Strip for the past 15 months, taken during the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. …SOURCE