By the time Luba Tryszynska arrived at Bergen-Belsen in late 1944, the world she had once known was already gone. Before the war she had been a nurse, a wife, and the mother of a little boy named Isaac. But at Auschwitz, on the selection platform, her three-year-old son was torn from her arms and murdered alongside her husband. Left alone in the camps, Luba spent her nights haunted by a single question: why had she survived when they had not? Then, one freezing winter night, she heard children crying outside in the darkness — and her life found its answer.
In the frozen mud beyond the barracks, she discovered fifty-four abandoned Dutch Jewish children, later known as the “diamond children,” sons and daughters of Dutch diamond workers who had been deported to Belsen after being separated from their parents. They had been loaded onto a truck and left there in the cold, the oldest only twelve years old. Luba carried them inside, fully aware that hiding children in a Nazi concentration camp could mean execution for everyone around her. Without asking permission, she pushed the bunks together, placed the smallest children against the warmest wall, and whispered to them in Yiddish, Polish, and broken German that they were safe now.
Then she took an unimaginable risk. She approached a camp officer — a man who could have had her shot instantly — and told him she would keep the children silent and hidden if he allowed them to stay. For reasons no one ever fully understood, he agreed and gave her a separate barrack. Inside one of the worst places on earth, Luba created what became a secret orphanage. Alongside Hermina Krantz, who helped wash the children and turn scraps into meals, and Dr. Ada Bimko, who struggled to keep the sickest alive, Luba spent every day begging, bargaining, and stealing bread, water, and occasionally milk to keep the children alive. Some guards quietly left firewood outside the barrack. One even brought milk once and walked away without speaking.
As the war collapsed, more orphaned children arrived — Polish, Russian, children whose parents had simply disappeared into the camps. By the spring of 1945, Luba was caring for more than ninety children, including babies less than a year old.
On April 15, 1945, British soldiers liberated Bergen-Belsen and encountered horrors they would never forget: tens of thousands starving, thousands more lying dead and unburied. But when they opened the door to Luba’s barrack, they stopped in shock. Inside stood rows of children — skeletal, silent, but alive. When an officer demanded to know who was responsible for them, Luba stepped forward and answered simply: “I am.”
Nearly all of the children survived. Some died shortly after liberation because their bodies, destroyed by starvation, could not handle real food and medicine arriving too quickly. But around ninety lived because of her. That summer, Luba personally escorted the Dutch children back to Holland and helped take others to Sweden. Later she married fellow survivor Sol Frederick and moved to Washington in 1947, where she built a quiet life and rarely spoke about Bergen-Belsen, the children, or even her own son Isaac.
Fifty years after liberation, in 1995, around thirty of the children she had saved reunited with her in Amsterdam. They were grandparents themselves by then — doctors, teachers, engineers, mothers, fathers — and many had never known her full name or realized the others had survived too. One by one they told her the lives they had built because she had kept them alive. The Dutch government awarded her the Silver Medal of Honor for Humanitarian Deeds, which she accepted with the same quiet humility that had defined her life.
For years, Luba searched for meaning in the unbearable loss of her own child. The answer she eventually found was not comforting, but it was real: the mother who could not save Isaac became the mother who saved ninety orphaned children instead. She spent the rest of her life carrying both truths together. Luba Tryszynska died in 2009 at the age of ninety-one. Nearly all of the children she rescued outlived her. To this day, they still call themselves “Luba’s children.”
#HolocaustHistory #WorldWarII #Humanity #JewishHistory #UnsungHeroes
The reason I love Jewish people.
dailybridgerton
germansingergirl
blakekathryn
tangentwithtanner
