Family Name: Barber
Previous Family Name: Baum
First Name: Edith
Father's Name: Ya'akov
Mother's Name: Hana
Year of Birth: 1932
Country of Birth:The Netherlands
City of Birth: Amsterdam
Edith Barber was an only child born in 1932 in Amsterdam. Her
parents were immigrants. Her father Ya'akov from Germany and mother, Hana from Poland . They lived in a
nice apartment at Ruysdael Straat 20.
Although Edith spoke only Dutch, her father spoke both Dutch and
German (in the house) and Edith's mother spoke both Dutch and Polish. 79,000 Jews lived in Amsterdam at that time,
almost 10% of the city's population. Like the Barbers more
than 10,000Jews were foreigners who had found refuge in Amsterdam in the 1930s. Her father manufactured clothing and her mother was a housewife.
The Barber family were well to do and
lived a good life. Her father worked for they They were a traditional family and her father was very
religious but Edith did not go to a Jewish school. She attended a private school
because there was no Jewish school in the neighborhood.
Life during the war
Edith does not remember any changes in
the family's life when the Nazis started the war on September 1, 1939 until the
time they occupied Netherlands on May 10, 1940. The Dutch were not violent to
the Jews but Edith remembers that Germans started passing laws and marching
through Amsterdam so her family went to the city of Harlem for a couple days and then
came back to Amsterdam. The Nazis invaded to the Netherlands on May 10th
1940, when she was 8 years old, but Edith did not feel any dramatic change in
their life until they were taken in 1943 to the concentration camp. Edith's
father bought a permit that allowed them to stay in their house and life was
not far from normal- she went to school, there was no need for extra food, she
did not feel any fear or anxiety and her father had been working as usual.
Her father had the chance to hide the
family with some Christian friends, but he refused to hide. He said that the he
believed in God and God would help him. Edith's father had many Christian
friends from work. One of whom let them come to his house to listen to the
radio because after the Nazis had occupied Amsterdam, the Jews were forbidden
to listen to the radio.
Edith had to go to school wearing a
yellow Star of David patch on her clothes.
During
Then, on a Thursday evening in January
1943, someone knocked on the door and commanded that they come with him. They
were taken to the theatre where they stayed a couple of days with other Jews
from the same region. From there they were transferred to Vought- a region in
the southern part of the Netherlands used as a concentration camp by the Nazis.
They were the first transport to arrive. They stayed there almost a year there
until December 1943. The permit did not help anymore and they were on their own. At 11 years of age, Edith started to
work sewing furs and shaping women eyebrows in the sewing workshop. In
July-August most of the camp had been transferred to Poland but Edith's family
had not been taken from the camp. They
got food packages in Vought. Edith's father ate only Kosher which Edith and her
mother ate, so she did not feel any hunger at that time, but her father who ate
only kosher did not eat them. In December 1943 they were transferred to
Birkenau.
Birkenau
In December 1943 they were taken by
train to Birkenau- Lager A, in Poland, where they stayed a couple of days under
crowded conditions. When they
arrived it was very cold and snowing and Edith was taken to the camp. Edith was
with three more girls- there was no selection, her hair was not shaved and her
clothes were not taken from her.
In Birkenau,
Edith was with her mother and other women and girls. All the other women were
shaved and wore a black and white shirt (including Edith's mother). The conditions were not horrible- she was not
working, and every day they took a walk (everybody walked together in a row).
They got some bread and soup, but that was enough for Edith, she was not
hungry. But slowly, everybody got dysentery and a lot of the women died.
Edith also got sick and she survived but her
mother did not survive the dysentery. After a month, most of the women in the
lager died, and Edith slept with the Slovakian blockalteste (the woman in
charge of the block) - because she was alone and she knew some German. After that, a lot of twins were brought
into the camp so the Nazis could experiment on them. A new block had been made
for the children and Edith also went to that block. At that time, she
contracted hepatitis and then scarlet fever so she slept at the Rivier(infirmary).
She was released one day before all the sick people who had been there were
sent on a transport.
At that time she was 11 years old.
Auschwitz and the death march
At the end of 1944, Edith was
transferred to Auschwitz. where there was a roll call every day with the SS but
the rest of the time the Kapos were in charge, who were even worse than the SS.
In January 1945, the whole camp was
evacuated, except the children and sick who could choose to leave or to stay.
Edith thought that if she had stayed, the SS would kill her, so she went with
the whole camp. The SS soldiers marched them for two days and one night. Edith
said that it was very difficult because it was winter in Poland, which is very cold,
and it snowed- when they were thirsty they ate snow. Anyone sat down and could
not get up he got shot so she would not rest.
After the march they were crowded onto
roofless coal cars, they rode for a week stopping from time to time so they
could get out of the car and eat some snow.
Ravensbreuck
After a week in the coal car, Edith
and the other Jews arrived at Ravensbreuck Concentration Camp in Germany, 90 km north of Berlin near the village of Ravensbruck.
There were a lot of Jews from many
places and transports. The conditions were very bad, so when she had a chance,
Edith went on a transport train to Neustadt Gleiwe, which was a work camp
located in Germany. While she was there Edith was very sick so she rested. They
barely got food and Edith had bronchitis which made her feel very bad most of
the time she was there.
The liberation- life after the war
In March 1945 the Russians
"liberated" the Jews in Neustadt Gleiwe. Edith said that she saw the
Russian tanks come into the camp and Russian soldiers gave her a sausage- she
was so hungry she finished it by herself but they were not yet release. The
Russian soldiers took them from camp to camp until they the Americans freed
them.
As Edith moved from to camp to camp, she hoped
to get to the United States to live with her uncle. But, she was informed that
she needed to go to Belgium. So she went to Antwerp where she stayed with a
nice Jewish Slovakian family , named Warrmont who adopted Edith.
They sent her to live near the sea in a
children's house for a while because she then had bronchitis. After that she
went back to live with the Slovakian family until one day when she was informed
that her uncle, aunt and cousin in Holland were alive. Her cousin worked in the
Jewish community. She went to live with her uncle in Amsterdam for one year. She
started attending the Zionist youth
organization "Sha'ar Yeshuv" and decided to immigrate to Palestine.
While she was in Holland she went to a Mizrachi high school youth Aliyah, [ a
Jewish organization that saved a lot of lives]. She immigrated to Palestine in
February 1948 with Aliyah D'. She has a Dutch passport so she went to Palestine
through Marseille, France with youth Aliyah. She reached Palestine on a Russian
boat and she stayed at her uncle's house on Akiva Street in "Hadare
Hacarmel", Haifa. Her uncle and aunt's names were Yulia and Leo.
After a period of adjusment, she became a
hairdresser, left her uncle's house and moved to Givataim. In 1950 she was drafted
into the Nahal Army Corps.
In 1951 she left the army and married
Ilan Barber. he was born in Germany and immigrated to Palestine before the
war. He lived on Kibbutz Kedma in the Negev and was a carpenter at the Dead Sea Works.
During the War
of Independence he served as a carpenter in the Navy at Haifa. After the war he
moved to Givataim to live with his parents.
They had two boys- Ya'akov and Amnon.
Belgium
Belgium is a federal monarchy in Western
Europe, which has boundaries with Netherlands, German and France. Belgium was conquered by the Nazis in May 1940. 65,000 and
70,000 Jews lived in Belgium, primarily in Antwerp and Brussels at that time.
The Germans had deported
nearly 25,000 Jews from Belgium to the Auschwitz Extermination camp, most
of whom were murdered between 1942-1944.
After the war, Antwerp,
which had already had a sizable Jewish population before the war, once again
became a major European centre of Haredi (and particularly Hasidic) Orthodox Judaism. About 15,000 Haredi Jews mainly Hasidic
lived in Antwerp.
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the capital city of
Netherlands, which is a country in North West Europe, near Germany and Belgium.
Edith Baum was born in Amsterdam in
Netherlands. Amsterdam was (and still is) the biggest city in Netherlands, and
populated most of the Jews that lived in Netherlands. Almost 80,000 Jews lived
in Amsterdam before the Holocaust, which is more than a half of the Jews in
whole Netherlands. At the beginning of the war, Netherlands hoped to stay
neutral. But in 10th of May 1940, the Nazis invaded and occupied
Netherlands.
The North of Netherlands is a long coast
strep. After the war, Edith lived near the coast for a while and couple of
years later she made an "Aliyah". Thousands of the Jews from
Netherlands that survived the Holocaust made an "Aliyah"- about 25%
of them.
