Bergen-Belsen: Among graves, we were born

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If you are currently overpaying on software to run your business, remember this number, 10 ,000. That's the number of new businesses that join Odoo per month. Join Odoo today at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

0:43And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

1:31I can see in front of me are just so many trees and shrubbery and it's very very green. It is and so all of this has been planted over the last 80 years as well. So I mean it's growth it's natural growth that's happened since this whole area was devastated by the burning of the of the concentration camp after liberation. I'm currently in Germany, being guided around the grounds of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by a special person. She's a different kind of survivor, in my opinion. And as we come upon these mounds that you will see, they're mounds of bodies and mass graves that the British came upon when they liberated this place.

2:29And they just had so many bodies to deal with. They buried them here and put a general sign. And you don't know for sure who's buried here. Wait, so what we're currently looking at right now is a mass grave. It's a mass grave. Wow. That's why I wanted you to come here. Because then you could see. I can see, gosh, like six, seven, eight mounds. Mounds, yes. That's Karen Lasky, a Canadian woman whose presence isn't seen in her height, but rather her energy as she smiles at everyone that walks past. She has a unique connection to this place. Her parents met after liberation in 1945. And soon after, Karen was born a couple of kilometres away in the nearby displaced persons camp.

3:21known as a DP camp. In fact, it was the largest in Europe. Over 2 ,000 people were born there over five years before it closed in 1950. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Amy Liebowitz. For this edition of Heart and Soul, I've come to Bergen-Belsen to meet women who were born in the aftermath of horror, children of Holocaust survivors who began life in the backdrop of death. The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is located in northern Germany. The event I'm attending here marks the liberation of the camp 80 years ago. Outside the museum, they had organised a big white tent to cater for the hundreds of people attending from different backgrounds and faiths.

4:13It felt a bit chaotic at first, but I was with a girl gang of Bergen-Belsen babies Susan, Karen, Felicia and Anita that adopted me at dinner the night before which made me feel at ease. Karen is a part of the Bergen-Belsen Babies group in Toronto and her parents immigrated to Canada when she was one and a half. Mentioning that I've never been to the camp before she wanted to guide me through it and that's where I've ended up. The first time I came here was in 2007 and this to me was something like I'd never seen before. So this says here lie 2 ,500 tot, which means dead. April 1945. This is one of the larger ones in the days following liberation.

5:04So many people were so sick that they didn't survive in those early days immediately post-liberation. Karen didn't know a lot about her birthplace until she was able to visit in 2007. She was already a grandmother at this point. In fact, she didn't even know that her original name isn't Karen. It's Christina, known as Krisha. Her parents decided that it would be best to anglicise her name on their arrival to Canada. 2007 to me was the first time I really came to terms with my real identity. because growing up as a child of two Holocaust parents who were so damaged, they never really talked to me about their history, and I never asked, and I knew not to ask, actually.

5:57I knew that they didn't want to talk about it just because I had a sense from a very young age that there was something horrific, and they didn't want to deal with it. so coming here in 2007 was for me a coming of age you know to really know who I was and being rewarded with my full identity and that's a really important thing for everybody to understand about themselves seeing the vastness of this place and what they both lived through in addition to seeing my birthplace was, you know, something that I never expected. And I think it completed me. So, I mean, you were born in this place. Yes. I'm looking at this and there's so much death here.

6:45And then for me, I look at this more as a place of life because my parents both met here after they lost everybody in their lives. And here's where they started their life again, after being in concentration camps. The liberation here is what I like to connect to more than anything, because it symbolizes life for me. I want to remember this whole place. There's stark contrast here. And we have to remember what happened related to the loss and the deaths, but I also think we have to look at the life in equal measure. And how has these experiences impacted your day-to-day life, or in fact your life throughout the years?

7:43Almost 60 years before I really knew anything, and then now this, what happened in the last 20 years of my life is that I became obsessed with knowing who I was and where I came from and I wanted to know everything about it.

8:03Hello? Hi, you must be Amy. Hello, Liz. I think it would be useful for you to understand where my interest in the Bergen-Belsen babies came from. You see, after being one of the reporters for the BBC's coverage of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, my grandmother reminded me of her childhood, sheltering from the Blitz in London. She had three cousins, Mina, Leia and Brenda, who had been tortured in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They eventually moved to the UK after liberation, but that's all I knew. So I'm meeting Laura for the first time. She's the granddaughter of Minna, which makes her a distant cousin of mine.

8:42I'm hoping she can help shed some light on the horrors that this forgotten part of my family faced. Would you like a cup of tea or anything? Yeah, that'd be great. So tell me, who is Minna? Minna is my grandmother. She died a number of years ago, but she was with us a very long time. We were very, very close. She was very diminutive, quite small, I think just over four foot, tiny, but the strongest person I have ever met. Can you tell me where was she born? Do you have any of that information? My grandmother was born actually Mina rather than Minna. So she was Mina Kleinzala and she lived in a small town called Brezko in Poland.

9:31Do you know anything about her schooling and what life was like before the Holocaust? Yeah, so she was actually quite an academic, which you can imagine for women in the 1930s was quite unusual. She was a nurse's university or midwife university training to be a midwife until just before the war started and just before the Nazis invaded Poland. So the Nazis invade Poland. What happens to her? Nothing at first, except she received a letter from the university saying, sorry, but you can't study here anymore. And I remember she said that she actually went up to the university and she said she begged them to carry on studying.

10:21Didn't ask, but actually begged. and her tutor there, the professor, was very upset and he said, I'm really sorry, but you can't study anymore. You're a Jew and we don't allow Jews to study. She can't go to school and then what happens? She was in Krakow ghetto. During that time, she was sent to do manual labour at Plashov concentration camp, which is the one that's famous in the Schindler film. So then after enduring such hard labour, where did she go? So they used to transport her back and forth from the ghetto to the camp and back again. She was put on another cattle truck and they went straight to Auschwitz.

11:08During selection, my grandmother, who was a trained nurse, and because of this she was separated from the rest of her family, she quickly ran over to see her mother and her mother said, just do as you're told. And then my grandmother was forced away to be in the other area and she never saw her family again. What was her experience like in Alfred's? I think the big thing is that my grandmother saw a lot of torture, a lot of humiliation.

11:46Close off. you're going to be deloused in order to be deloused they shaved all hair off of every part of the body a friend of mine Franca she was cold first when she came out I cried she looked like an animal when they shaved every hair of everybody, you don't feel human again. You feel like you are nothing. You're it. Also, my grandma kept on talking about Leah and Brenda. Do you know much about them? I wish I did. I wish I knew more about Leah and Brenda. The only thing I do know is I've got a photo of my grandmother and Leah and Brenda. Let me see. In a jeep. Can you see? It's in a Jeep outside a block called 57.

12:48If there's anything you have on Leah and Brenda, I would absolutely love to know more about them. This is the documentary on the BBC World Service.

13:02Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian. and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott.

13:35So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

13:46My name is Amy Leibowitz and on this episode of Heart and Soul, I've travelled to Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp, speaking to two women where both of their families lost everything and had to start again.

14:04After Karen took me around, Susan and her son Andrew gave me a wave to get on the bus. Susan Schwartz was born at the DP camp, and then her parents migrated to Canada. In fact, her and Karen used to go to summer camp together. Eventually, she moved to Los Angeles. I'd describe Susan as cheeky and very witty, who's lived various lives, including connections to a famous rock band. You should ask her about it if you get the chance. We're on our way to DP camp. Yes, we are, and we're going to see where the hospital was and where some of us lived. and the barracks are there too. Why was this important to you to come here?

14:43Because I was born in the DP camp and I've been back several times and it's important for me to see and when I go to the DP camp I feel comfortable, I feel like I'm at home. Really? Yes, because I guess it was the first place I knew.

15:03The museum was taking us on a bus tour of the once British-owned military site, the former DP camp. But we were told that we had to be carefully guided because in 2016, it turned into an active German military site. As we approached the Roundhouse, a former SS building, Susan excitedly pulled Andrew and I out of our seats and we went directly to the stairs. Yep, these are the stairs I went down when I was little. I have pictures when I was three years old in my fur coat. I happen to be a cute baby. It's very big here. I didn't have any expectations. This is my first time here. If you remember when you were little, was there a lot of freedom to walk around?

15:46Oh yeah, they would go to cellar and buy me ice cream. That's what I remember. The ice cream, I like the ice cream. So I have to get an ice cream and sell it before I leave. I love ice cream, so I get it. They used to go to cellar all the time and they used to go to Hamburg and buy cigarettes and stuff to sell in the cantina. They left in 1949. Susan told me tales about her parents surviving Bergen-Belsen. During liberation, British soldiers gathered those that had survived, and her two parents were put together. And six weeks later, they were married. She describes them both as hustlers. Her mother, Rushka, pretended to be a chef and cooked for the SS.

16:24And her father would sabotage bombs while enduring forced labour. At the DP camp, her father acquired a pet dog for Susan, like any parent would, except this one had a swastika burnt into its ear. The dog was abandoned after victory. Her parents did the best they could with what they had. Yeah, because no country wanted them. Finally, the United States opened up and then they went to Canada because my uncle went there as a tailor, but he couldn't even sew. My mother had to teach him. And then they brought us the next year. When Canada accepted your family, where did you go? We went on a ship called the SS Samaria, and we left from Bremen.

17:04All the people we still knew when we got off the ship were still friends. Wow. We landed August 15, 1949. Life continued, right? Life continued, and we lived on 90 McCall Street. I even know where I lived, but it's gone now. It's now the Ontario College of Art. We had one room, and we shared a kitchen with other families. And when was the first time you came back here? I came back here when they started the tours, whenever that was. This is the fourth one I've been on. And you were never afraid to come back? No. And when I come on this property, I feel very calm. It's like home for some reason, because it's the first home I ever had.

17:41Yeah. Like I said, I didn't have these parents that were like neurotic and scary. My parents were pretty fun, yeah. Susan spoke about families finding it difficult to adjust. And back then, there was no such thing as diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. Everyone was just trying to fit in. Her parents had explained to her that there's no way that they could go back to Poland after the way that they were treated. They wanted to be modern. They wanted to be like the Canadian people. They didn't want to be like refugees. And then they started having a business. My father worked and my mother, she brought a sewing machine from Germany.

18:20She fixed uniforms for a uniform company. And I came here because I have a connection through family, and you were born here. But for those that haven't been here before, maybe don't have a connection, why do you think it's important? It's important to continue tradition. The people have to be remembered. They suffered, and people have to remember that. But they also have to remember that people from here that were born here came to have good lives, and they got to go all over the world. He didn't get rid of us, put it that way. And how do you feel about your son being here today? I'm very happy he's here because he's learning about my heritage and his heritage.

18:59And he's, you know, documenting it. It's good. And I got to meet Amy. Thank you. When I found out I was visiting the museum, I contacted the museum's archivist, Bernd Horstman, to see if he could find out any further documentation about my family. and he agreed to meet with me. After speaking to Laura, I knew a bit more about my relative Minna, but we still didn't know a lot about Leah and Brenda. So I'm walking through the museum, up some stairs, into a corridor and entered into a large room filled with binders from floor to ceiling. We sat down and Bernd explained that I wouldn't find anything because everyone's names and locations were spelt incorrectly.

19:49Leah and Brenda's names are actually Lee and Bronca. We went through a bunch of files and there it was, a communication from the British Red Cross that Uncle Harry and Uncle Solomon were desperately trying to find their niece Minna. But what about Leah and Brenda and this picture I have of the three of them?

20:37I was in Auschwitz on my bed, and next to me, on my other bed next to me, were two little girls. I looked at those girls, youngsters about 14, 13, and I thought, are there something about them that I know? Mina found her two younger twin cousins, Leah and Brenda, next to her, and then they were separated. At liberation, Minna put her nursing training to good use and worked in the DP camp. I walked up the second floor in this hospital, 57. Brenda and Lee were there. I didn't see them since Auschwitz. And when they saw me, they were so pleased, they were so happy to see me. Now I know from documentation that all three women were on death marches, being made to walk from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, which is approximately 800 kilometres, and took them about two months.

21:39I now also know that all of their family members were murdered in different concentration camps.

21:49So, Karen, before we go to synagogue, I just wanted to show you something. After our talk yesterday at the camp, I was able to meet with the archivist and he really kindly gave me some documents about my family and they're to do with the DP camp so I thought I have to like talk to you about it and I'm hoping you might be able to give me maybe a little bit more information. So I'm trying to find out more information about these twins, Bronca and Leah Chagrin. And I found out that they were in block 50. No, no. The archivist, Bernd, who is an angel from the memorial, he has helped many of us piece together our history.

22:42And when I was here in 2007, which was my first visit to my birthplace and the memorial. He gave me my identity card from the DP camp, and I was in Block 50 with my mother, and I was a babe. And at that time, he explained that Block 50 had women and children, but not the fathers. So are these female twins? Yeah, yeah. So basically, they're sisters. Oh my gosh, I cannot believe it. Sadly, I was a baby, so I don't have any memory of Block 50. But what Byrne told me, there was up to 500 to 800 people per block. Wow. Per logger. So, huge amount of families. And I guess the British segregated them because maybe for the bathrooms and whatever, they wanted all females together in a block.

23:41I don't know. That's something we can ask the archivist. But isn't that a wonderful coincidence?

23:51After Karen's first visit, she became dedicated to finding other Bergen-Belsen babies in Toronto and is still a part of the group today. I took that story up until the present. And I go and I talk to kids, I go and I talk to schools, I've gone to synagogues, inspired other babies who have not found their history to go and find it. And then we came into digitization. So everything in the last 10 to 15 years is now digitized. So they can find everything online. I didn't have that benefit. So, you know, how much longer are these witnesses to this going to be around? You know, I mean, it's going to come to an end.

24:33And for me, that's on my shoulders now. I feel that, but I've also, I'm close to 80. I want to take that story forward, and that's why I have involved my children and my grandchildren. And I've made a pledge to myself, and we want to take this story forward. And whoever the babies want to join me in that, I'm hoping many of us will.

25:00Okay, so I've just come back from the museum, and I have a bunch of documents to show you. you ready? I'm not sure go on okay so I managed to find out more about Mina Leah and Brenda wow oh I can't wait to see them oh can I see now? Yeah yeah you can see them what you can see here is the grandma with her name there and this is Richter Solomon what's that foreign relations yeah so the British Red Cross ah wow yeah that is amazing absolutely amazing and you know being able to see these records what does that mean to you what does that bring well it sounds silly but it it puts it in black and white for you to hear it from somebody's mouth is just it's testimony but you can't visualize it unless you see it I've always believed my grandmother I've always had such a broken heart about my grandmother but to actually also see it in writing it it means that everything she said everything the good the bad.

26:29It's all here in black and white and it just makes me feel, I feel like I could, can I keep these? Yeah. I'm really pleased and it means so much to me to keep those. Thank you. Mina received this correspondence and in return she sent a letter to Uncle Harry and he eventually got it in his letterbox. My Uncle Harry received it and you couldn't believe it that I was, that anybody it was the life of his family in Poland. One day I had a phone call. Mina, I would like to see you. With the help of the United Nations, the women were able to go to England via Paris on the 7th of April, 1946. Once reaching Paris, Mina received a phone call from Uncle Harry.

27:18My uncle phoned me up. He said, Mina, I'll be there tomorrow. He came to see me. And when he saw me, He put his arms around. He said, my God, it's my sister. Listen, you look like my sister. He said, God, I can't believe it. I've got somebody alive. Linda from the family.