Brief family reunification

The kitchen is situated near the gate that leads
out of the camp. Not far from there, Lieberman
hears voices calling out to her, "Celinqa,
Celinqa." "At first, I thought I was already in
heaven and the children from Kielce were calling
me, but suddenly I see a huge group of women, all
of them wearing coats and shoes - you can´t
imagine what sort of impression it made, coats in
the middle of Auschwitz - and a few of them are
yelling to me, `Celinqa, Celinqa, your mother´s
here, we´re getting out of the camp, run away,
come to us.´"

But Lieberman knew she had no chance. Eight
miserable women had gone to the kitchen to bring
soup, surrounded by who knows how many guards and
one gigantic dog. "I see mama among the women, but
she is looking ahead and doesn´t notice me at all;
she´s petrified. And then we get to the pot, and
we take the boiler and it slips out of our hands.
As if God heard my request. To this day I don´t
know how it happened, but suddenly all of the
women were around us, women from the camp; I don´t
even know where they came from, everyone rushing
to get some of the soup, even licking it off the
ground, and the dog jumped on them, and the women
from my block are shouting at me, `Celinqa,
Celinqa.´ And I run away and find myself next to
them."

From Auschwitz, the group of women, Lieberman
among them, went to the Ravensbruck labor camp for
a few weeks and then to a new camp nearby, Malhov.
It was there, on April 26, 1945, that Lieberman
and her mother were freed. A few months later,
while in Sweden, they learned that the father of
the family, Ishak, had survived, but that Cela´s
brother Tadek had died on April 24, 1945, a few
days prior to liberation.

Nevertheless, the family reunification was brief.
Lieberman, who found God in Auschwitz - "He was
the only friend I had there," she says - begged
her parents to let her enroll in a religious
school. Her mother, consumed with having to take
care of her husband, who had come back ill from
the camps, complied with the request. Lieberman
studied for four years in an Orthodox boarding
school near Stockholm, going to visit her parents
only once or twice a year.

"Papa and mama were very close to one another, and
Mama took care of him," Lieberman explains. "They
weren´t available to me. I became more and more
religious, which drove them even further away.
Even after we immigrated to Israel in 1949, and
came to live in Hadera, I learned in Haifa and
visited them only on the Sabbath."

Lieberman, still in her teens, confronted her
fears alone. At the dormitory in Sweden, for
instance, she was certain that at any moment the
staff was liable to take off their clothes and put
on SS uniforms. Later, in Israel, after the birth
of her first son, Hudi (now the head of the Karnei
Shomron local council), at the age of 22, Cela was
afraid to touch the baby. "I realized that I´d
never seen a baby up close. At home we didn´t have
any babies, and later on I grew up among older
people, both in the camps and in the boarding
school. And here I was, bringing into the world
this wrinkled little baby. It was weird. I felt
that he didn´t even have the right to exist, like
the children there, in Kielce."

The birth of her second son, Bentzi (chairman of
the Yesha Council of Jewish Settlements of Judea,
Samaria and the Gaza District), four years later
was more calm, and it also led to a rapprochement
with her mother. It was only then that she
understood the enormity of her mother´s torment in
Auschwitz. "After the birth of my two sons, I
understood what mama felt; she knew that any
German could kill me at any given moment," she
says. "She´d always be looking around her with her
eyes sticking out, checking if anyone was looking
at me, to see if I was in danger. It was very hard
to be in Auschwitz with a child. Later on, I
understood this, and it was then that we finally
got closer."