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"Love Life": The girl who survived Mengele and survived thanks to Ganz's mother - Walla! news

2020-11-07T10:23:36.009Z


Esther Friedman, who was born in a small village in Hungary, lost her entire family in the Holocaust, was in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, arrived at the Cyprus concentration camp and arrived in Israel after a difficult journey and with the help of a special friendship with the defense minister's mother. "She always made sure that our house was happy," her son said


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"Love Life": The girl who survived Mengele and survived thanks to Ganz's mother

Esther Friedman, who was born in a small village in Hungary, lost her entire family in the Holocaust, was in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, arrived at the Cyprus concentration camp and arrived in Israel after a difficult journey and with the help of a special friendship with the defense minister's mother.

"She always made sure that our house was happy," her son said

Tags

  • The Holocaust

  • Holocaust survivors

  • Bnei Gantz

  • Auschwitz

  • Bergen belzen

  • Joseph Mengele

Eli Ashkenazi

Saturday, 07 November 2020, 09:30

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In the video: Ganz meets with Holocaust survivor Esther Friedman, saved by his mother (Photo: Avi Cohen, Dotz, Editing: Tal Reznik, Narration: Aviv Abramovich)

Seven years ago, as chief of staff, Bnei Gantz came to visit Esther Friedman, Dr. Mangala's experimental survivor who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, as part of the "Flower for Survival" project, and during the war years had a special relationship with Malka - the defense minister's mother.



"I belong to the Holocaust generation," Friedman told Ganz.

"You are the generation of redemption."



Despite her youthful hardships, Friedman was a woman full of the joy of life, who saw her adult life as part of a personal and national redemption chapter.

A week and a half ago, she passed away at her home in Petah Tikva, surrounded by her loving family members, and she is about 88 years old.

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"You are the generation of redemption."

Friedman and Gantz (Photo: IDF Spokesman)

Friedman was born in 1932 in the Hungarian village of Kratsomor to Gabriel and Tova Deutsch, a middle sister to Shoshana and Yehudit.

The family members - the only Jews in the village - made a good living from various branches of agriculture, and employed workers, locals.



Esther loved nature and the fields, rode horses, climbed trees and when she needed to was also not afraid to go beating.

It was an observant family, and on Israeli holidays the family members would travel from the village to a larger town, to be in a larger crowd and pray in a synagogue.

"This scream has been waking me up for 70 years"

With the conquest of Hungary by the Germans, family life, like that of all the Jews of Hungary, was turned upside down.

At first, Gabriel was taken to a labor camp, and has not seen him since.

"One day," Esther told her children, "a truck came to the village and they put us on it."

The family was transferred to the ghetto.



Esther, her mother, sisters and grandmother were taken to the Auschwitz camp.

She said they were crammed into the wagons in terrible density.

"It was impossible to sit down," she said.

"Only the one who died was on the floor," she said.

When they got off the caravan, she was separated from the rest of her family, and she no longer saw them either.



Another fate awaited Esther: she was taken to a pavilion where Joseph Mengele performed experiments on humans.

There was little to tell about the period there to her family.

She said she remembered all sorts of shots being fired at her, and she remembered horrible screams she heard from girls who had been tested.

Only in old age did she share with her children the terrible memory: "This scream has been waking me up at night for 70 years," she told them.

A doctor who worked in the pavilion took her with her one day and told her that she would never return to the hut.

A woman full of joy of life.

Esther Friedman (Photo: courtesy of the family)

From Auschwitz she was transferred to the industrial city of Essen in Germany.

It was initially placed with thousands more placed as life shields around various production facilities.

She was then taken to work in an ammunition factory of the Krupp family corporation.

The 12-year-old girl stood by a kiln all day and had to feed the fire with coals.

Beyond the hard work, she was subjected to the cruelty of soldiers and officers who beat, beat and slapped her as they passed by.



A few months later, she was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp.

Then she also fell ill with typhus, and was already on the verge of death.

"It was the most horrific camp," she said.

"The dead were no longer collected. It was impossible to step on the floor with so many bodies."

The person who extended her sponsorship and supported her was a girl four years her senior, Malka Weiss - later Malka Ganz, the mother of Bnei Ganz.



In the testimony she gave, Ganz said that Friedman was thin and small, and looked like a nine-year-old girl.

She promised that if she survived, she would make sure that the girl Esther would also survive.

Food she managed to steal - whether a slice of bread or a bit of soup - is smooth with her friend.

Esther's physical condition was so bad that one day she was thrown into a pile of corpses.

Malka realized she was still alive and pulled her away.

That day the camp was liberated, and Malka asked the English soldiers to take care of the dying girl.

More on Walla!

NEWS

Ganz to the woman his mother saved in the Holocaust: "You are the first for the fighters"

To the full article

Brave friendships.

Esther Friedman (left) and Malka Ganz (Photo: IDF Spokesman)

Bergen Belsen, Cyprus, Atlit

From Bergen-Belsen the two girls were transferred to Sweden, with more children and boys.

Little Esther, sick and weak, began to recover and become stronger, and was eventually adopted by a Swedish family.

After a long period of living in hell she gained a home, her own bed, warmth and love.

However, one day she heard a conversation in which it was said that they intended to baptize her into Christianity.

In the morning she got up and ran away from home.

She heard about a convalescent home where Holocaust survivors live and came to it.



On January 24, 1947, she and 663 other immigrants boarded the illegal immigrant ship "Olua" off the coast of Israel, which was renamed "Haim Arlozorov."

Among the other immigrants were also Malka Weiss and Nahum Ganz, who later married.

On command, 25-year-old Arie Luba Eliav.

After sailing in stormy weather and in extremely difficult conditions, the ship docked in Italy, so another 684 illegal immigrants boarded it.

To make room, the "veterans" threw suitcases into the seawater.



The British who followed the ship's route waited for it as it approached the shores of Israel, on February 28, 1947. After a violent struggle between the British soldiers and the illegal immigrants, the British took over the ship and took its passengers to the deportation camps in Cyprus.

The illegal immigrant ship "Oloa - Chaim Arlozorov" in the port of Marseilles, 1946

She left 50 great-grandchildren.

Friedman with Ganz (Photo: IDF Spokesman)

In a camp in Cyprus, the girl Esther underwent military training by Haganah emissaries sent there.

A few months later she was released, and arrived at the Atlit camp in August 1947. From there she moved to the agricultural school at Mikve Israel.



There, a 15-year-old girl, completely lonely, recounted her ordeal.

The boys refused to believe her, so she decided that she would no longer tell what had happened to her.

It was only during the Demjanjuk trial, decades later, as well as over the past few years, that she shared her experiences with her family.

She did this sparingly too.



Mikveh Israel participated in a number of military operations in nearby Arab villages, from which fire was fired at the nearby road.

The girl, who had already lost her entire family, later said that in her situation at the time she felt it did not matter to her whether she would die or live, and she volunteered to carry a backpack with explosives on her back.

"She said playing better than any psychologist."

Friedman (Photo: Courtesy of the family)

After Mikve Israel, she moved to the religious kibbutz Sde Eliyahu south of Beit She'an, where she used her skills as a horse rider to convey messages to localities and authorities in the area.



At the end of November 1949, the Hapoel Mizrahi movement established the Nir Galim cooperative moshav near Ashdod, and Esther came to help.

There she met Shmuel Friedman, a Holocaust survivor, born in Budapest and active in the Bericha movement.

The two married and moved to Tel Aviv.

They had three children: Gabi, Tova and Eli, who were named after their parents who perished in the Holocaust.

Over the years, 17 grandchildren and 50 great-grandchildren joined the family.



"Mother always made sure that our house would be happy. We did not have a sense of sadness and loss. There was concern for the children but it did not cause them to prevent us from doing whatever we wanted," said her son, Eli.

He added that his mother loved art, and in particular music.

"She said playing was better than any psychologist and encouraged us to learn to play," he said.



"Mother loved life. She would say that one should never despair and after a fall one should know how to get up and move on," he said.

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Source: walla

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