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A British nurse told my mother she was lucky to survive Belsen. She didn’t feel lucky

A writer tells the story of her mother’s unlikely survival of the death camp — and the British brigadier who fought to save as many inmates as he could

April 13, 2020 11:42
Female inmates of Belsen photographed just after liberation of the camp
5 min read

On April 7, 1944, 14-year-old Rachel Genuth sat down to the Passover Seder with her family, including her five siblings, and an aunt and her baby. Her uncle had been drafted into munkaszolgálat (Hungarian forced labour).

That her father had returned from that same wartime service was a miracle. A year earlier, Moshe Genuth had survived a massacre: Hungarian officers set a barn containing more than 600 Jewish labourers on fire; they gunned down those who tried to flee the burning building. 

Since her father’s return, Rachel would not leave his side. And on that April evening, in the midst of a raging war, in their small apartment in Sighet, Transylvania, the Genuths enacted rituals to remind them of the oppression of their ancestors in ancient Egypt.

Neither Rachel nor anyone in her isolated hometown could imagine what was about to happen. Within two months, Rachel’s entire family, save her older sister Elisabeth, would be murdered. Nearly half of Sighet’s population — its Jewish community of 11,000 — would vanish from the face of the earth. And Rachel would struggle to endure an alternative universe called Auschwitz.