Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I’d like to share a unique story about my connection with one of the foremost heroines of the WWII.
In 1995, I read an article in The Oregonian by an author named Margie Boulet, which would change the course of my life. At the time, I was living in Portland, Oregon, working in the advertising industry after stepping away from my startup film and video production company that had been struggling to land its next gig. The article was about a woman who had found and cared for 54 Jewish children at a concentration camp and over a four-and-a-half month period. She was able to keep them alive and fed, and hidden during that time, and she ultimately orchestrated their release. Her name was Luba Traczynska, and she was the Angel of Bergen-Belsen.
I nearly fell off my seat when I read that Luba, this “Angel,” would be visiting Portland. She had long-lost cousins who had emigrated to the area. One of my neighbors in the apartment complex where I lived held an esteemed position with the Jewish Federation of Portland, so I raced to his door, and we set up a meet-and-greet.
The timing of this article perfectly coincided with a trip I had planned to New York City for a friend’s wedding at the 5th Street Synagogue. What was supposed to be a brief pitch meeting at A&E Network (part of Time Warner, which includes channels like Lifetime and The History Channel) turned into an hour-and-a-half planning session, and a deal was subsequently inked. I’d be embarking as the writer and producer on a trip with a camera crew of five (self-included) to interview Luba and the “Diamond Children.”
The Diamond Children had parents who worked in the diamond business in The Netherlands. Given their families’ importance they’d been spared during the Nazi raids and allowed to remain, albeit in captivity, with their nuclear families. One fateful day this arrangement came to an end. The men were summoned to the commandant’s office and ordered to give up their contacts in the diamond business. They refused. The fathers were “disappeared,” and their wives were sent to the salt mines. The following evening, on Dec. 5, 1944, the children were loaded onto trucks, driven around for what seemed like hours, and then abandoned in a remote corner of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Dec. 5 happened to be St. Nicholas Day, a cherished prelude to Christmas in Germany marked by celebration and gift-giving—a day that would offer these children a far greater gift, the gift of life.
In 1996, when I began work on the documentary, many of these “children,” along with Luba, were still alive and they kept in touch with one another. It was both an honor and a privilege to travel to their homes—some in Great Britain, some in Belgium, Amsterdam, and some right here in the U.S.—to interview them about their harrowing experiences and the conditions surrounding their rescue.
At the time of their ordeal, the children ranged in age from newborn to about 13 or 14 years old. Throughout the interview process, both on and off camera, they recalled their memories of that traumatic night with different levels of recollection. Some were too young and could barely remember the experience, just knew they had been part of something very special. One of the survivors, a Dutch woman named Hettie was the oldest. She was able to fill in what the others could not. Having a little knowledge of the German language, she described hearing arguing among the guards who were transporting them. The trucks suddenly stopped. The children were ordered out and left in a forgotten construction site at the edge of the camp. She believed that the drivers of the trucks they had been loaded into collectively decided to spare their lives by driving them around and then dumping them in a field next to the “nurses” quarters. By this point in the war, Allied bombings had cut off supply lines to the camp, and morale among the Germans was low.
Meanwhile, in a barracks across the field, Luba lay awake, unable to sleep. It was only her second night at Bergen-Belsen. She and a close friend, another prisoner, had been brought from Auschwitz to tend to victims of a Typhoid epidemic sweeping the camp. Although Luba wasn’t a trained nurse, she had learned enough from an aunt with whom she had lived as a younger woman to feign to be an expert in medical care—a skill that had saved her life. Skilled workers were often spared by the Nazis until their skills were no longer needed.
It was only Luba’s second night at Bergen Belsen. She was often best with insomnia recalling the horrors of losing her own husband and child many months prior when her toddler Itzak was torn from her hands by Nazi guards and put on a transport truck to an unkown destination— his wailing and crying echoed in her head and through the night.
She asked her friend, “Do you hear that? I can hear a baby crying.” At which point the friend told her she was hearing things due to her trauma and to go back to sleep. Certain she was not hallucinating, Luba followed the sound of the crying child out into the frigid night. To her astonishment, she found 54 children abandoned at the edge of the camp.
What happened next is a story for the ages. Over the next four-and-a-half months, until Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British Red Cross on April 15, 1945, Luba managed to hide the children from certain authorities, creating a network of supporters—both inmates and guards alike—who helped keep 52 of the 54 children alive. By the time Bergen-Belsen was liberated, only two had succumb due to their dire circumstances. After all, an epidemic — the same one that infamously claimed Anne Frank (whom some of the Diamond Children actually knew) was raging through the camp.
A young documentarian named Alfred Hitchcock happened to be filming the liberation of the camp, capturing footage of the “Diamantjuden” as the British arrived, including a Red Cross nurse named Han Collis. Collis took Luba and the children under her wing, and Luba eventually made her way to the United States, where she lived out her years with the story of that fateful night—the night she became known as the Angel of Bergen-Belsen.
As incredible as this story seems— how a woman was able to save that many children by hiding them in her barracks— it was, at least in part, due to the context of the war’s end. Many Germans were also suffering due to lack of food and supplies. Perhaps, amid St. Nicholas Day festivities, the guards at the watchtowers had neglected their duties. Or perhaps it was just pure luck, or even divine intervention. But what wasn’t down to luck is the network of people at Bergen-Belsen who would band together to hide, feed and clothe the children until the bittersweet day of their liberation.
Some of the Diamond Children couldn’t leave Europe fast enough, while others returned to their homes in Amsterdam. Some, like Maurice Raynor, a boy of about 12 or 13, would lose his sister (one of the two Diamond Children who died) but be reunited with his mother, Sissy, who was in her nineties and living in Palm Desert, California, in 1996, when I made the documentary. A few months after the interviewed she died, having been able to tell her part of the story as one of the mothers of the Diamond Children. In all, I interviewed nearly a dozen survivors of the ordeal, wrote the narration and, along with my production team filmed and edited it. We delivered it to A&E Network and they decided it would air as part of Bill Kurtis’ Investigative Reports series.
The story has since been retold in film and book form. I made my version of Angel of Bergen Belsen long before the days of streaming or digital uploads. If you’re interested, the film can be purchased on Amazon on DVD and VHS at this link.
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