Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) -So you don't have a menorah. And you don't have access to supplies that would enable you to create a reasonable facsimile of one. This was the position my mother, Rachel, was in when she was 15 years old. A great miracle had occurred four months earlier - Rachel had been selected to leave Auschwitz for a slave labor camp. After two-and-a-half months in the shadows of the gas chambers and crematoria, she was sent to Christianstadt, a Frauenarbeitslager (women's work camp). Three weeks...
On April 15, 1945, the British Second Army entered Bergen-Belsen. One week later, prisoners in the concentration camp beat Rachel Genuth (my mother) until she lost consciousness. The 15-year-old had managed throughout the war to evade punishment at the hand of a Nazi officer or kapo. Now, after the liberation, while blows fell on her, she thought, “We who survived will never be human again.” In the winter and spring of 1945, Bergen-Belsen, in northwest Germany, had morphed into the largest repository for inmates shunted from the east, away fro...
