Eighty Years After Liberation, Both the Anguish and the Resilience Live On

“What’s amazing is how, despite these horrendous losses, they just got up and started all over again; there’s so much we can learn from that,” says Yael Richler-Friedman, who directs education for Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

By: Deborah Fineblum

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.

And it is right about now that International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27 comes to remind the world that eight decades ago, the remnant of European Jewry—most of them half-dead skeletons, starving and riddled with typhus and other diseases—was released from their Nazi hell.

Liberation officially began in July of 1944 with the Soviet troops who arrived at Majdanek where, as reports have it, they were shocked at the condition of the prisoners. However, the bulk of the liberations occurred the following winter and spring with the Soviet takeover of Auschwitz-Birkenau—the most deadly of all the camps (an estimated 1.1 million were murdered there) on Jan. 27—prompting the United Nations to choose that date in 2005 for annual remembrance observance and ceremonies. Only 7,000 remained alive there (along with 600 unburied corpses); most of the living having been ordered on death marches elsewhere as soon as the Nazis heard of the approaching liberators.

Among the grisly evidence the Soviets found, besides the dead, the sick and the starving: some 14,000 pounds of human hair.

American forces liberated Buchenwald (prisoners taking charge so the guards could not do any other killing before running off). Spring also saw U.S. forces arriving at Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen while the British military freed Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen. There, 55,000 prisoners remained alive, though barely. Some 13,000 would die within months from illness and starvation.

Still, most liberation figures fail to account for those hidden by friends or hiding in forests or the tens of thousands deported to Siberia and other outposts of the Soviet empire.

“Being deported, a truly terrible fate, ironically saved their lives,” says Edna Friedberg, senior program curator and historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

But one misimpression is that the Nazis only murdered people in camps, she adds.

Yes, there are haunting photos and even films that show that carnage, but well over 2 million Jews were massacred and buried in mass graves by the Germans with their many local accomplices throughout Eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands more died of starvation or were murdered in Nazi-enforced ghettos.

Whether they were killed in concentration or work camps or local massacres, however, Eastern European Jewry was destroyed. The large Jewish community of Poland, for instance, shrunk from roughly 3.5 million in early 1939 to 250,000 in mid-1945, a 93% rate of annihilation.

‘The enormity to sink in’

Physically, mentally and emotionally, most of the surviving Jews were mere shadows of their former selves. And suddenly, their focus switched from desperately hanging onto life to confronting the reality that their families, communities—indeed their entire world—had been destroyed.

“They were in an information vacuum, not even letters got through to most of the camps,” says Friedberg. “And in their weakened condition they had to face the truth that everything they’d been longing to return to was gone forever.” The search for family, which often proved fruitless, would take months and even years.

Indeed, in an Organization for Jewish Refugees in Italy survey, 76% of survivors interviewed had lost all their relatives, finding themselves the only living members of their family.

“We talk about the anguish of liberation,” says Robert Rozett, senior historian at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. “Because, though some were ecstatic, others were in such terrible shape they hardly noticed it, and yet they suddenly had to confront what’s happened to them and what they’ve lost.

“For most,” he notes, “it took months or even years for the enormity of it to sink in.”

Rozett, author of After So Much Pain and Anguish: First Letters After Liberation (2016), raises a key point: There were nearly no attempts for vengeance by the survivors. “Why? At Dachau, the liberators killed hundreds of guards, but the prisoners going for revenge? No. Maybe it was Jewish tradition or maybe it was because of all they’d been through, but mostly they focused on finding family and figuring out what’s next for them,” he states.

Little left in Europe

Though it was a natural longing for survivors to return home, nearly all those who made the trip found there was no longer a home to return to. Indeed, they were often turned away from their former residences by the new (and less than pleased) inhabitants—a welcome that occasionally turned violent. It’s been reported that in Poland alone, more than 1,000 Je§ws were killed by former neighbors during the first year after liberation, including the infamous pogrom in Kielce in July of 1946.

Another revealing statistic: Of 51,000 Jews who tried returning to Hungary in the spring and summer following liberation, some 41,000 are said to have left within a few weeks or months for the relative safety and Jewish community found in displaced persons (DP) camps, some of them in Germany. Many a survivor married and began families there.

These camps remained functional until 1952, by which time most Jews had moved on to what was then British Mandatory Palestine (getting past British embargoes was often risky until the modern-day State of Israel was declared in 1948) with others sponsored to come to the United States (finally allowing in Jewish refugees in 1948), as well as England, Canada, France, South Africa and Australia.

One tragic and well-publicized event: In 1947, the dilapidated old ship, Exodus 1947, was turned back from the Haifa port by British forces with its 4,500 survivors (two of whom along with a crew member were killed by British gunfire) sent to refugee camps in Germany.

Post-liberation

For Quint, who recorded her story with Barbara Sofer in the memoir, A Daughter of Many Mothers: Her Horrific Childhood and Wonderful Life (2017), liberation was followed by months of recovery—first in the camp and then in a Swedish hospital.

There followed an offer of adoption by a Christian couple. “But they were told that Jewish orphans need to go to Palestine,” says Quint, now 89. Soon she was taken to the United States by a woman who then died of her injuries, after which a childless Jewish couple adopted her. Forty years ago, Quint immigrated to Israel with her husband, Rabbi Emanuel Quint, and their four grown children, where she continues to speak to groups about her experiences during World War II and the Holocaust.

For 8-year-old Frankel, liberation was more of a family affair with his parents, two brothers and two sisters (the two older sisters were found later in a German DP camp). “But at that time, we had no idea that 100 members of our large family from Austria-Hungary had been murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” he says.

First stop: a DP camp in Switzerland for a couple of months before he was taken with big brother Mordechai through Italy into then-Palestine, where they landed in a Jewish orphanage for six years, the place of his bar mitzvah. Frankel went on to fight as a commander in virtually every conflict Israel fought—from the War of Independence in 1948 through the First Lebanon War in 1982. And, as a lawyer and then judge, he was a founder of the first Hesder Yeshiva for religious soldiers.

His story, From Bergen-Belsen to Jerusalem, was published in 2010.

Many years after liberation, Frankel was visiting his mother in Brooklyn, N.Y., when there was a knock on the door. There stood a woman and a tall young man. “‘Don’t you remember me, from Bergen-Belsen?’ she said to my mother. ‘This is the little baby whose life your milk saved.’”

‘The survivors chose life’

“What’s amazing is how, despite these horrendous losses, they just got up and started all over again; there’s so much we can learn from that,” says Yael Richler-Friedman, who directs education for Yad Vashem. “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.”

Historian Rozett adds an important distinction. “They didn’t reconstruct their lives; they built new lives, reaching beyond the destruction of their old world, to grow new families in new homes,” he says.

“Every one of their lives is unique, but that’s basically the story of these survivors: raising families, contributing so much to the world, building Israel. The anguish and the resilience: They’re both parts of the survivor experience.”

          (JNS.org)