The Angel of Belsen, part one.
- Feb 28
- 1 min read
They were once a normal family, Hersch and Luba and little 3-year-old Isaac, Russian Jews surviving the war years as best they could. And then came 1943, the year in which they were arrested and sent to Auschwitz. In a selection there, Isaac was torn, screaming and crying, from Luba’s arms and taken to the gas chamber, and Hersch was shot soon after. Why had she lived, Luba wondered? What now was the purpose of life?
Her answers would be found the following year when she was transferred to Bergen Belsen in Germany. On only her second night there, a truck pulled up outside her barracks and dumped out 46 terrified Dutch children, ages 1-12. They were left there with no food and no shelter, simply left to perish in the inhuman conditions. Luba gathered them into the barracks and scrounged what scraps of food she could find for them. The following day she received permission from the camp doctor to care for the children. She would keep them carefully quiet and out of sight for many months. When Bergen Belsen was liberated on April 15, 1945, quite incredibly 44 of the children were still alive despite the squalor, starvation, and rampant typhus.
"I always wondered why God let me live, why I was saved… It was to love these children."
Luba Tryszynska became known as the Angel of Belsen.
This is a story in 3 parts – next time, how the 46 little Dutch children happened to be abandoned on that night of 1944…
