Ein unerträglicher Tag - und immer noch gibt es
neue, unbekannte Geschichten aus dem Tor zur Hölle
-------------------------
www.haaretzdaily.com

`I thought I was the only Jewish girl left in the
world´

By Ronit Roccas

When Cela Lieberman was 11, her mother daubed
lipstick on her lips and cheeks. `From now on,
you´re 15,´ she said, thereby saving her.

Row after row of Germans and Ukrainians surrounded
the death grounds in the Kielce ghetto in Poland.
Throughout an entire night in 1943, some 2,000
men, women and children - the remains of a large
community that had not long beforehand been sent
to an unknown location in the East - stood there.
In complete silence they stood, and with them Cela
(Celinqa) Lieberman, then 11, one girl out of the
48 children still left in the ghetto. Suddenly a
screech is heard: "Leave the children here!" Roza
Albirt, Celinqa´s mother, removes a kerchief from
her sack, wraps it around her daughter´s head, and
paints her cheeks and lips with lipstick. "Now,"
she tells her, "no more crying. You´re 15."

"Time passes and suddenly I see that they´ve taken
all the children and that only my brother and I
are still there," Lieberman recalls. "He was then
14, and I thought I was the only Jewish girl left
in the whole world. After the aktion, they took
everyone who was still left to a factory building,
and two days later I managed to find two other
children who´d hid out in the ghetto. All the
others were brought to the cemetery in the city
and shot."

In the book "Celinqa - A Girl Who Survived
Auschwitz," which was recently published by Yad
Vashem Publishing House, Lieberman describes the
children´s aktion in terrifying detail. She says
she remembers it all, just as it happened at the
time, even without the journal she wrote
immediately after the war.

Dreaming of loaves of bread

In the book, she writes that she stayed with her
family in Ganryquw, a wagon factory, for an entire
year until July 1944, at which time they were told
to pack up their belongings. They were promised
that they would be sent by train to Germany to
work there, but Celinqa was afraid, terribly
afraid. Ever since all the children were taken
away and she was the only one left, she´d been
afraid all the time. "Everyone was afraid, but if
you were in their crosshairs as I was, you were
much more afraid," she says. "I knew I was a
child, and therefore, had no right to exist, and
I´d been consumed by fear ever since then."

Even in Auschwitz, where the train took her, the
fear was stronger than the hunger. "In Auschwitz,
everyone talked only about food," relates
Lieberman. "There were 12 women in every bunk, and
the whole time they would talk about the foods
they used to cook at home, and would exchange
recipes. It calmed them down
[...]
The women would talk about food, and Lieberman
would lie all scrunched up on the bunk, shaking
all over and talking with God. "The whole time, I
asked him to let me die without feeling it - just
like that, in my sleep. Once, when we were cold,
mama asked me what I was thinking about, and I
said I was thinking about the ones who went to the
wires - to the electrical fence - who were heroes.
One second they are afraid, and then that´s it;
it´s all over. And then mama said, when the first
snow comes down we´ll hug each other and then go
to the wires."

In the middle of hell, God heard

But Lieberman left Auschwitz before the first
snow, and the way in which she was saved, as she
describes in the book, seems impossible - a work
of near fantasy. She remembers that the winter was
already at its height - maybe it was the end of
November 1944, she is not certain - when she heard
women whispering about a selection that was taking
place in the camp. Lieberman was a "musselman" (a
word used to describe the "walking dead" in the
camps), whose body weight was barely more than the
weight of her bones, and she knew she would not
pass the selection.

About 2,000 women were gathered in the selection
hut. At one end stood the naked women, and at the
other stood Mengele. All of a sudden, the head of
the block walked up to Lieberman´s mother and
asked her: "Is this girl yours? She won´t pass the
selection. Give her to me, I´ll conceal her."

"She took me to a room off to the side, and told
me to wait there until she could give me the sign
to leave," recalls Lieberman. "When she knocked on
the door, I went straight out into the hall, and I
had to climb up the steps, from the side, to join
with the women who´d been selected for work, but I
was afraid and I had no strength, and it took me
too long. The whole time, women were climbing the
stairs and none of them helped me. And then, as I
was slithering up the steps, Mengele caught me and
threw me toward the place where those sentenced to
die were standing."

At that moment, her mother was at the top of the
steps, but then their eyes met, and her daughter
sent her a kiss. In a single moment - Lieberman
doesn´t know how she managed to get past all the
women between them - her mother was standing
beside her. But her mother, Roza, had been
selected for the happy group that was to be used
for labor; Mengele noticed her, brought his whip
down on her back, and sent her back to the living.


Celinqa remained with the group that soon marched
off toward the furnaces. A few steps before the
crematoria, a command was given to turn left, and
the women who were sentenced to death were ordered
to wait in a room off to the side. "We were a
small group, and the Germans didn´t want to waste
a can of gas on us, so we had to wait until we
could be joined by other women from the next
selection," says Lieberman.

Holocaust survival stories are always random, and
astonishing. Lieberman, who grew up in a secular
family, does not believe that anything is random.
The story of her survival is so impossible that
she is convinced that it was there, in the middle
of hell, that God heard her. "The following day,
at noon, they asked for a few women to bring food
from the kitchen. I wanted to join, but the
blokowa, the woman responsible for the block, said
that I wouldn´t have the strength to pick up the
pot. At that moment I was like a little girl that
has to go outside and whom no one can stop. I have
to get out, I have to, maybe I´ll see mama. And
the blokowa says, `If you collapse, they´ll kill
you without any mercy.´ I will not collapse, I am
saying, and I go with all the others."

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."

http://www.yadvashem.org/download/temp_download/te
mp_index_download_remembrance.html

Name Reading Ceremonies:
The names of the Holocaust victims that appear in
the files below were taken from some of the Pages
of Testimony submitted to Yad Vashem. The first
three files are more general and contain names of
Jews who perished from all locations. For those
who would prefer to commemorate the victims of a
specific location, we have also provided names of
Holocaust victims by country.

Please note: the lists of names in this section
were prepared for use in commemorative ceremonies
and represent only a fraction of the victims´
names actually registered in Yad Vashem.

Yad Vashem has over 3 million names computerized
from Pages of Testimony and other sources.

Ich gedenke.