Holocaust survivor Rena Quint was disturbed by a Tuesday Jerusalem Post article about the projected loss of the remaining survivors over the coming decades, but at a telling of her story at a Wednesday joint Zikaron BaSalon and Jerusalem Press Club event, the 89-year-old expressed resolve that she would educate about the Nazi genocide for as long as she could.
Sharing her story the day before Israel commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day, 80 years since World War II, Quint acknowledged how it had been difficult to remember what had happened to her when she was a small child.
Through the fog of memory, she and journalist Barbara Sofer had charted the events of her survival, patching the story together with the documentation of her family and persecution. They wrote a book, A Daughter Of Many Mothers: Her Horrific Childhood and Wonderful Life, detailing Quint’s experiences. There are only two years of Quint’s life that could not be corroborated with documents.
Born Freida Lichtenstein, Quint was only three years old when Nazi soldiers marched into Piotrków Trybunalski in 1939 with their tanks, guns, and “beautiful” uniforms. Some Jews fled to Belgium or the Netherlands, Quint noted, but they didn’t know that the Nazi war machine would soon follow.
Escaping death dressed as a boy
The Jewish quarter was fenced off to form a ghetto. Jewish families from around the region were exiled to the ghetto, where they were forced into close accommodations with other families. Without food, they starved; without medicine, they grew ill. Able-bodied people, mostly men, were taken away for slave labor. Quint’s father was sent to work at a glass factory.
One night, Quint awoke to Nazi soldiers calling for them to exit their houses. They were rounded up into the synagogue. Quint was with her mother and two brothers. She remembered a man beckoning her from a back door.
She couldn’t remember how she left her mother, or how she got away in the chaos, but she did know that she went with the man. She escaped the fate of the rest of her family, being taken to the Treblinka death camp.
The man took her to the factory where her father worked. He and the other workers hid her, disguising her as a boy.
She remembered the sweltering heat and the growling dogs that would savage the workers. It didn’t matter if their wounds got infected. There was no shortage of workers – those who couldn’t work were executed.
Some memories had been lost, but she could still remember the journey to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
They were loaded into cattle cars as the Allies approached and sent to the concentration camp. There was no food or water, and the smell and heat of human bodies packed together were overwhelming. Many people fainted or died during the ordeal.
When the cattle cars came to a halt, people drank and ate dirty snow to sate their gnawing hunger and thirst. Yet an end to their journey did not mean an end to their suffering.
The Jews were divided into men and women, and Quint’s father was no longer certain that he could conceal her among the men. He entrusted her to a school teacher and sent her with the Jewish women. She never saw him again.
While some images were lost to Quint, she noted that it was the smells and feelings that lingered. The smell of death never quite left the nostrils. The cold of the camp returned whenever she felt a chill. Every day, hundreds died in the camp, again denied sustenance, further beset by rampant disease. According to old medical charts that she found, she suffered typhus and diphtheria.
Quint was ready to die on April 15, when soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms arrived at the camp, announcing that the Jews were free. Thousands died even after the liberation, many due to difficulties in weaning the starving survivors back onto food – refeeding syndrome. The barracks, infested with typhus, rats, and lice, were burned down by the British Army to control the epidemic.
From Bergen-Belsen, Quint was sent to a refugee camp in Sweden. In 1946, she was adopted by a family that was bound for the United States – their daughter Fanny had passed away, but they had all the documents and approvals for the deceased girl to come to America. Rena entered the country through Ellis Island under the false name. In the United States, she slowly adapted to life. She recalled that the other children enjoyed teaching her the nature and names of basic objects.
One day, her adoptive mother Anna disappeared. She only understood what had happened when she was taken to a cemetery for her funeral. Quint didn’t cry – some may have thought that she didn’t love Anna, but she did. Quint didn’t know that crying was the correct response to death – at the camp, death was the norm – there was no point in crying.
Quint was adopted by the Globe family, a couple that didn’t have children. She remembered fearing their little dog, so different from the German Shepherds in the glass factory, but the fear gnawed at her all the same. She pretended to like the dog because she was concerned that they cared for the animal more than they liked her.
Looking back, the worry was funny to Quint, as the Globe family became her own until her adoptive mother passed away in Jerusalem at the age of 100.
“Every time my mother was killed, another woman took her place,” said Quint.
Six mothers, six identities – the love and protection extended to her taught her that it was not possible to make one’s way around the world alone.
Quint met her husband, Rabbi Emmanuel Quint, in the United States. She still keeps the love notes that he would give her over the years, some of which said that God had saved her for him. Together, they had four children, a family that later blossomed into 26 grandchildren and 56 great-grandchildren. In 1984, Quint and her family made aliyah, where she still resides in her Jerusalem home.
In 1989, she visited Poland to seek out the fragments of her past. She found her old house, still adorned with the mezuzah. A cabinet was still filled with Judaica. She found a pre-nuptial agreement between her mother and father.
From the document, she could tell what jewelry belonged to her mother – but she could not recall how she looked, even the color of her eyes. The synagogue where she had last seen her mother, with its bullet-pockmarked ark, still remained – but there were no more Jews in the town to pray there.
Since coming to Israel, Quint has worked with Yad Vashem to continue the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, imparting the stories to visiting dignitaries such as former US president Joe Biden. This week, she is set to meet new US Ambassador Mike Huckabee. She had a great fondness and gratefulness to the United States, though she noted that she would never go back – even if the State of Israel faced great peril. Quint said she would not forgive the Germans, nor did she want to forget, but noted that “people change.”
“Germans were once our enemies, but now they are among our greatest friends,” explained Quint, pointing to the support Germany had given to Israel.
Quint saw similarities in motivation between the Holocaust and the October 7 massacre, though the approaches and capabilities were different. She called for the war to be brought to an end and the hostages to be brought home.
“The difference is now we have a state,” said Quint. “Now we have an army.”
Another similarity was that, as some now doubted the events of the Holocaust, with all its documentation, others were not doubting the atrocities of the Hamas-led pogrom.
For all the documentation, it was the act of remembrance that kept the story alive. Quint shared how she had fought to reclaim her past, to keep her memories alive. When writing the book with Sofer, she tried so hard to remember – but nightmares plagued her. A psychologist told her that she had “remembered enough.”
Zikaron BaSalon representative Esther Wall noted that her program, which means “remembering in a living room,” had grown from a ceremony in one living room to a tradition held in living rooms across the world. Over the decades, the program had reinvented itself so that new generations could tell their family’s stories.
Quint will continue to share her story and her memories with all who will listen, but listening is no longer enough. As participants at the event noted, it was now time for the fire of such memories to become a torch passed on by families, generation to generation, and never be forgotten.
