Eat Too Much And Die

Based on several true stories
"LT" is Luba, a camp survivor.
"JR" is one of the children she saved.

LT:
Were the Allies really coming? During the first week of April, we knew everything was about to change. The sound of gunfire, air raid sirens and bomb explosions moving closer and closer seemed to tell us that the end of the war might be near, at least for Bergen-Belsen. The SS guards became strangely civil to us. I suppose they wanted to have us tell the Allies how good they had been to us during the final days. One of the SS officers, the one whose finger I had bandaged, told me he would make sure that the children got all the food they could eat, and he found a big pot for me to carry the food in, right out in the open. He filled it with bread, as well as meat and sugar which we had seen none of during our entire time in the camp, with the exception of the one time I got some horse meat for us to eat.

A few days later, we noticed other changes with the SS as well, and there were rumors floating around the camp that a plan was afoot to poison our food, maybe even to blow us up in the barracks while we slept.

JR:
In the days leading up to the Liberation, the SS guards started to wear white bands around their arms, a sign of their willingness to surrender without a fight. And they were not wearing guns anymore.

LT:
The day before we were liberated, April 15, 1945, British troops were outside the camp. We learned later that the camp Commandant, Josef Kramer, had made a deal with them to wait three days outside the camp before entering in order to avoid any fighting. The SS, he promised, would surrender without any problems. The allies smelled a rat and sent in a spy who found out that all the food in the kitchen that day had been poisoned. The SS wanted the extra time to poison us rather than see us set free. The Allied spy also found dynamite under many of the barracks. The decision was made to come into the camp without further hesitation.
On the day of the Liberation, I walked to the kitchen as usual, but it was abandoned; there was not one soul there. I left without taking any of the small amounts of food laying around. If the rumors about poisoned food were true, I did not want to take a chance with the children. On my way back to the barracks, I heard a loud speaker in the distance coming closer and closer. It was blaring out several messages over and over again in several languages. I will never forget the words I heard.

"You are free. You are free", the voice said again and again, in German, Polish, Russian, English, French, maybe Dutch, as well. "The SS are gone. No one will harm you any longer. Food and other help is on the way. Your are free; you are free!" My first thoughts were of the children, and I ran as fast as my legs would take me to the barracks to tell them the news. The Allies were here! We were free!

JR:
The allies came rushing in with two tanks only because their troops were not fully prepared to come in, and they wanted to make certain the SS would not poison us or blow us up.

I had a hell of a time getting to the fence because I couldn't walk very well, I was so weak from typhus. I crawled to the fence. Myself and several of the other children were gathered at the fence looking out on the main road of the camp. The camp had a wide main road that went through it, that could be seen from all the different camps.

There was a loud speaker that was making a series of announcements about the fact that we are being liberated. They were saying that everybody should be calm and we were not to worry, not to fear, that we would be getting good food very soon and that we should not eat the food that was given to us from the camp because it is all poisoned. The voice said not to drink or eat anything until we saw a person in an Allied uniform giving it out.

As I was standing at the fence watching these tanks come in, there was a man in the Canadian army right there on the first tank. The tank had stopped abruptly because these soldiers had not expected to find children, and they were shocked. I suppose this soldier, a captain, was even more surprised when he called out to us in Dutch, and we answered him in our language, his language as well. He was a Dutch man who had fled to Canada and joined the army. Here he was, looking at children from his own country.

His name was Montesanis, and he asked if I had ever heard that name because he thought that his wife and children were somewhere in our camp. None of us knew anything about the possible whereabouts of his family. We told him about the location of the general camp where it was likely to find such people as he described, if they were there. I do not think he ever found them.

An hour or two later the camp was flooded with British soldiers. We were overcome with emotion. Luba was jumping up and down with joy with her girlfriends and with some of the children. Everybody was very happy. I mean it was an unbelievable experience.

I have all my life been a God fearing person. At this moment, I saw an image -- I will not say it was God -- but I saw an image of an old bearded man.
"Don't stay with this," the vision of the old man said. "Turn the page and move on with your life."

I lay on the ground and wept.

LT:
The Canadian captain who was a Dutchman came to the barracks, and we talked about what had happened over the previous few months, with one of the children translating for us. The captain pulled a small chain from around his neck and presented me with a mezuzah.
"This has kept me alive the entire time I've been in uniform", he said. "It has kept evil away from me, and I want you to have it. Wear it, and it will keep you safe and healthy."
He kissed me, and lifted me up off the ground by the waist. We were all so happy. At the same time, I could tell that this man and the other soldiers were horrified at the sight of all the corpses laying around the streets of the camp. The SS had forced prisoners to bury as many bodies as possible before the Allies came, but there were too many to dispose of before the British troops came in. There were many, many unburied dead.

JR:
Corpses were piled right across the street from our barracks, across the alleyway. When you went out of the door from the barracks you would immediately look at all the bodies that were piled up there. Nude, by the way, because before the dead were picked up from each barracks and thrown into a wheel barrow for removal to the open pits used as grave sites, they were stripped of their clothes. And, you know, it was just a routine to take these bodies and throw them in there.

LT:
Several days after the Liberation, the British soldiers rounded up members of the SS and made them do the job that we Jews had been doing, that is burying all of the bodies that were laying there. They brought people in from the surrounding villages and forced them to watch.

From what I remember the SS were the same as when the shoe was on the other foot. They screamed and cried and begged for mercy just like we Jews had done.

It didn't make me feel in any particular way. I was numb. It was just the same thing I had seen before except now it was the SS that were doing it and it was not so apparent that it was the SS because none of them were wearing any shirts or jackets. They were all in their pants and naked from the waist up because the British, wishing to make their humiliation complete, had stripped them of their uniforms. They had no dignity left, they were not such big shots anymore, just people who were afraid, and for good reason.

Many of the women had sticks, and they were hitting the SS and carrying on. They were having fun, but I didn't particularly see it as a happy scene. I would have been happy just to see them shot. But this particular turnabout, I didn't spend too much time watching it.

One SS guard, an older man perhaps in his 60s, looked pale as he threw our dead into the ditch. He turned to me and said, "I cannot do this. I am hungry and tired."
I had some old bread still in my pocket from one of my trips to the kitchen.
"Untersturmführer, are you hungry?" I asked.
"Oh, yes!" he said.
"Here!", I said, thrusting the hard crust at him. "Eat this!"
"Das Kind", he said, "I cannot eat this." Never in all my years of unpleasant dealings with the Germans had any of them used the endearment "child" in reference to a Jew.
"Why not?" I asked. "This is what you gave us to eat. Why can't you eat it?"
He did not answer as tears welled up in his eyes. Was this cruel of me? Perhaps, but we had been mistreated by the SS for so long, it was natural to take some pleasure from their discomfort. My bad feelings for them did not last. It is easy to feel sympathy for any human when you see them suffer, even a member of the Allgemeine SS. Three days after the Liberation, a man in civilian clothes came to me with a letter. "I helped you once," it read. "Now please help me. I need civilian clothes so I can escape." It was from the SS guard who had told me I reminded him of his wife, the one who allowed me through the gate separating the men's camp from the women's camp. The one who knew I was taking food to the children each day and who did nothing to stop me.

Why not? I thought. Yes, he was an SS guard, a German, a man from a country which had tried to kill every Jew in Europe, but he was still a human being who needed help, and he had made it possible for me to keep the children alive week after week in those final days of the war. But I would have to be careful. If any of the other survivors knew what I was doing, they would probably kill me for helping a German.

I had some idea what size clothes he wore, and I found the things he needed amongst some of the survivors. We were free to move around as we wished, so I went to where he was hiding in a public toilet in the town outside the camp. I had a bundle with some bread, a tin of canned meat, and the clothes he requested. From outside the little building, I called out, "It's Luba; I've brought the things you need, plus a little food. Good luck. I hope you make it. I will never forget you. You saved the children."

There was no reply. I put the package on the ground outside the door and left.
---

After all we had been through, who would think that food would now become a problem? For some prisoners, the large amounts of rich foods available from the British were more than a problem; they were fatal.

JR:
There was an argument among some of the British army medical people whether to slowly feed us or to just give us whatever we could handle. The minute the Allies came in, their people gave us all the food we wanted, and there was an understandable tendency to eat too much of the kind of rich foods our bodies had not had in them for months.

LT:
The British soldiers were wonderful. They brought us chocolates and all sort of other foods. Many survivors, whose bodies had not been used to digesting much food, stuffed themselves with all that the British offered them, our liberators thinking they were doing a kindness to us. What should have happened, of course, is that the survivors should have slowly gotten used to eating good food. For my part, I would not allow the children to indulge themselves in this way, and some of the other women in the camp cursed me, saying I was being cruel by depriving the children of the good food that was available at last. But I knew their starved bodies needed to go slowly, and I am sure some of them would have died had I not insisted they eat little portions of only certain foods until they grew stronger. Each day, I would increase what each child was allowed to eat, a little bit more soup or meat today than the day before.

We got more than food as well. Much more; the British brought in nurses, doctors, and many others to help us. They moved us to the barracks where the SS had lived. What a difference. They had comfortable beds, with real sheets, clean sheets, and towels. They gave us soap and shampoo. The British wanted to bring everyone together so they could figure out how to get us to our homes, so more children were trucked in from surrounding camps -- Poles, Russians, Hungarians, French and others, some with their mothers, many orphans. The British soldiers made swings and other play things for the children. They brought busses into the camp and took us for rides around the countryside. It was a wonderful, exhilarating time.

JR:
We were all busy kids, busy being spoiled by these wonderful liberators. Everybody had their own soldier, their own buddy. Your buddy would come in the morning and hang out and give you chocolate and take you around in the jeep and try to do the things that kids liked to do.

In my case, because I was one of the older children, a Dutch soldier took me in his jeep and we went to Buchenwald. I can't remember what exactly for, some kind of official business. It was a three day trip back and forth. We stopped at farms along the way, and the soldier would take his gun out and force the German farmers to feed us. All the liberating soldiers were very angry at how we had been treated, and they were very rough with the Germans.

When we returned, Luba and the children had been moved into the barracks once occupied by the SS. These quarters were better than any of us had ever lived in during our entire lives. We all came from modest backgrounds, having lived in tiny apartments in Amsterdam, and this was a luxury building. There were clean sheets. There were beautiful kitchens with clean stoves, radios in the wall. The SS certainly knew how to take care of its own.

LT:
The children laughed, cried, talked and played a great deal. We were in shock that we had made it, that the SS were gone. At the same time, there was a lot of apprehension about what was next. Where would we go? How would we get home, those of us who thought there still might be such a place for us after all these years? I began to realize that my time with these wonderful children would eventually come to an end, something I never thought about before the Liberation. While I was happy that they would be reunited with their families, my heart was heavy because I knew that parting with them would be very painful. So much of our experience in the camps had to do with loss, and here I was about to experience loss again, one of the greatest losses of my life.

JR:
Germany surrendered on May 6, just three weeks after our liberation. That is something I remember very well, because I was so curious about what happened to Hitler. I can still see the face of the solider I asked.
"Do you know what happened to Hitler?" I pleaded.
"He committed suicide," he answered.
That was when I truly believed it was all over with at last.

It was right around this time, I think, that the Allied soldiers gathered us all together. They thought we would enjoy watching them burn the camp barracks to the ground. There has never been a more satisfying fire, I don't suppose, for any of us. The soldiers did it, they said, because the buildings were infested with lice and disease. I think they also did it as another way to make us happy.

We stood by silently and watched these lice-infested old buildings go up in flames and smoke. It was a way of both demonstrating to us that the evil was truly over, but it was also a matter of hygiene. Few of us seem able to remember events from our early childhood. But life in a concentration camp has a way of making strong impressions. One of the children who stood and watched the burning of the barracks was a five year old boy named Ronnie Abaham. Ronnie grew up to become a well-known painter. In the early 1990s, he presented me with an oil painting that depicts that day the barracks were burned. In it, you can see so much of the pain and darkness we all took with us from that place.

LT:
Once the barracks were gone, the children had received medical attention, clothes, and food, and the authorities began to look for their relatives, I knew it would not be long before we would be separated. I was determined to stay with them as long as possible, and the children let the Allied authorities know they wanted their Schwester Luba around too. Before we knew for certain when the day would come when they would return to Holland, the decision was made that I could accompany them back to their homeland. This way, they would feel secure with an adult they had come to trust and love, up until the time they could be reunited with family.

JR:
Luba now had more time than before when every moment of her day was spent taking care of all the children. She still took care of us, making sure the kitchen prepared the right food for us. She still wanted to be our mother. But the overall management of the kids was now in the hands of the Allies. Especially the Dutch among these Allied troops, and there were quite a few of these. Because we children were Dutch, the Dutch soldiers and other officials felt, I guess, especially responsible for us. They were very hands on about their management of the kids.

As far as all the children were concerned, Luba was still the adult we looked to as our primary caretaker. I don't think the Dutch authorities saw it quite that way.

About four weeks after the Liberation, a Dutchman whose name I think was Tienis came to us and said, "I'm trying to get a plane for you to get you kids back to Holland. Would you like that?"

Naturally, we all said yes because that was where we expected maybe to find our families. The next day, the Dutchman returned and said we were all going in a military plane leaving the next day at ten o'clock in the morning.

LT:
When the day of the trip back to Holland arrived, I was unsure what to do. Should I return with the children or say goodbye? If I did not go with them, where would I go? If I did go with them, what would I do in a strange country where I did not speak the language or understand the customs? The children had crowded around me each day, crying, begging me to travel with them back to their homeland. They told me that if I didn't like it in Holland, I could always return to Poland. Like anyone who loves their birthplace, they were certain I too would fall in love with Holland and want to remain there.

Finally, I decided to go, even though I did not get a very warm reaction from the Dutch authorities who now took charge of the situation. Hermina was to stay behind and care for another group of children who had been brought to the camp after the Liberation. The Diamond Children and I were told that nurses from Holland would accompanied us on the plane ride.

The plane we flew on made the flight a terrifying experience. It was not a passenger plane, but rather a troop transport, so we were strapped into harnesses along the sides of the plane, and some of the children were hysterical the entire journey. Many were so sick to their stomachs that the entire plane smelled of vomit. The noise of the engines was so loud, you could hardly hear someone speaking even if they tried to yell above the din. The children clung to me throughout the trip, rejecting any attempts at comforting them from the nurses or soldiers who were with us. None of the children knew for certain whether they would be reunited with their parents or other loved ones. The only thing they know for certain is that they were leaving the Nazis behind and were finally heading back to their homeland.

We landed in Eindhoven in the south of Holland, not far from the border with Belgium, although most of the children were from the Amsterdam area. There were a few relatives waiting there who had learned that the children were on their way, but most of the children were still unsure who if anyone from their family was still alive. A military truck came and took us from the plane. They placed us all temporarily in an old school house. They gave us some blankets, and we had to make do with sleeping on cots.

This was not a comfortable time for me, for the Dutch were not warm to me, which I found surprising in view of the role I played in saving the lives of so many of their children. Because of the language barrier, there were few words exchanged between the authorities and me when they came to claim a child. There would be a "thank you", and that was about it. While some of the British soldiers who were Jews could communicate with me by speaking Yiddish, I did not find one Dutch official who could speak to me in that language. The children were doing a lot of chattering, so I assume they were trying to explain who I was to the Dutch officials, and how I had become their "Schwester Luba", begging them not to separate us.

JR:
It is true that the reception Luba received was a cool one, but in retrospect, you cannot be angry. First of all, the Dutch were overwhelmed with the number of people that came back so quickly. Second of all, a lot of the people returning from the camps, as well as the people back at home, had been fighting for their lives, so everyone had a fierce attitude. Everyone was emotionally drained, and not very cooperative. If you said to them, "Get up tomorrow morning at six", they would give you an argument about that because they were all used to fighting every inch of the way. There was a wildness about almost everyone that you could see in their eyes.

These kinds of events don't unfold like they do in a storybook.. Sure, people were glad the war was over, but I think it had been so long since anyone had felt joy or gratitude that they did not know how to feel these things right away.
Everyone in Holland had just had a horrible experience with the occupation. And frankly, some of them may not have even liked Jews, that is another factor. The war was over, but some things never change.

LT:
After being in their country for a couple of days, the Dutch authorities found a translator for me, and I was finally able to communicate with the adults. They formally invited me to stay in the Netherlands, showing me a large, government-owned house that they said I could live in for free for the rest of my life if I wished. My first thought was that, while this was a kind and generous offer, what would I do alone in a strange country where I did not speak the language? The children were leaving me, one by one, and staying there would only remind me every day of their loss to me. I thanked the Dutch, but declined their offer. Some of the older children who had been reunited with their families came back to visit me, bringing me food, trying again and again to talk me into remaining in Holland. But I had no interest in staying in this strange, uncomfortable land.

While they may not have been overly expressive in their thanks to me, the Dutch authorities also gave me a document, a piece of paper that recognized my part in saving the children. It said that should I ask for it, the government or any of the people of Holland would give me any kind of help that I might ask for.

JR:
There were so many urgent problems that were facing us, and the situation became somewhat confused. Luba decided she wanted to go back. She seemed lost because the whole reception was a lot less ideal than we had envisioned. We always thought when we came back that the Prime Minister or the Queen would be waiting to welcome us. It would take a long time before people calmed down enough to become reflective about what had happened to them and to their fellow countrymen, children included.

At first, I was told that I could not return to Amsterdam right away because the bridges between Eindhoven and there were still out. But after two weeks or so, it was my turn to leave. I never really had much of a chance to say goodbye to Luba. Everything was happening so fast.

LT:
Although the older children could identify the younger ones, they were still the most difficult to place, and I ended up with some of the babies as the last of the children for me to take care of. As some of the children were processed for return to their families, their parents or other relatives often had had to come for them at night when they were asleep, so anxious were they over being separated from me. Daytime separations were often filled with tears and hysteria. This was understandable when you consider what we had been through and how I had become the central source of security for them over the past few months. When Jack finally left for a relocation center in Amsterdam, my heart sank. This was one of the worst days of my life up to that point.

After the last child left, I thought at first about joining my sister in Argentina. Then I considered that there were still many displaced children back in Bergen-Belsen, and I told the Dutch authorities I wanted to return there. I received some documents from the government that would allow me to travel from their country to wherever I chose to go. I felt completely lost, worse than I had ever felt during my days in the ghetto or in either camp. That may be difficult to imagine, but these children had come to mean so much to me that when the last one was gone, I felt as if my life had ended. I found myself wishing I had never been born, a thought that never crossed my mind during all the hard times in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Some of the older children would not end their campaign of trying to convince both me and the Dutch authorities that I should stay in their country, but my mind was made up.
---


I was told that I must catch an unscheduled flight that would land first in Nuremberg, Germany, and then fly on to Bergen-Belsen. At the time, of course, I had no idea that many infamous Nazis would be tried in Nuremberg, including the former commandant of Bergen-Belsen, Josef Kramer. He would be found guilty of war crimes and hanged.

The Dutch captain who gave me the mezuzah on the day of our Liberation took me to the little military airport at Eindhoven. Since we had no idea when the plane would pass through, the captain was kind enough to make a make-shift bed for me by taking out the back seat of his car and putting the cushions on the floor of the small building that served as a terminal. That way, I could sleep but would be ready whenever the flight became available. He waited with me, and about 11:00 PM that night which was sometime in late spring of 1945, we learned that a flight would soon land that could take me on my way.

When the plane arrived, the captain walked up to me and asked for my passport. I had none, and he was very surprised at this. The officer told me to give the captain the document which the Dutch officials had given me in Eindhoven. When he read what the government people had written, that I had saved fifty-two of their children, he put his arm around me and said, "You can fly wherever you want that this plane goes. I will take you with me anywhere you want to go -- London, if you like!"

When I arrived in Nuremberg, a woman soldier met me at the airport there, and we traveled many hours by car, arriving at Bergen-Belsen mid-morning. It was an incredible scene when we got there, something I had no reason to expect. Somehow, Hermina and the group of ninety-five children she was looking after had gotten word that I was returning. The car had to move slowly because the streets were clogged with flowers and children. I was stunned to see these children lining the streets and cheering me. They had tied flowers everywhere along my route. They were singing songs, and calling out, "Schwester Luba, Schwester Luba!" It was a real contrast to the greeting I had gotten in Holland, and it made me feel loved at a time when I really need it.

Some of these other children had been brought to me by the Germans in the final days before the Liberation. Others came to me in the days after the Liberation. The British would bring them to me whenever they found a stray Jewish child. They were from all over Europe, and the authorities were having no luck in locating their families. Or worse, they soon discovered that this or that child had not surviving family, that they were one of the millions of orphans who had survived the horrors of Hitler's Reich.

The question became one that has been with the Jewish people for thousands of years: where could they go? As if in answer to our prayers that these beautiful little ones too might find a place to call home, the government of Sweden announced that they were willing to take them in and find them homes. Hermina and I decided that this group of children also needed a loving escort. We would travel to Sweden, where I could meet another of the great loves of my life. Someday, I will tell you that one, too.