INHUMANITY LOVE TEARS OF JOY MONSTER AMONG HORROR
HOW SURVIVOR OF BELSEN FELL FOR HER LIBERATOR
WEAK, emaciated and on the brink of collapse, Jewish teenager Rywka Berkowitz and her sick mum were waiting for the end in a concentration camp hut when a British armoured division arrived at the gates.
It was April 15, 1945. And among the liberators who entered the terrifying Bergen-belsen concentration camp over the next few weeks was Charles Salt.
And even though the paths of the skeletal 15-year-old and the Military Police soldier never crossed among the 60,000 survivors within the barbed wire fences, the pair were to later become astonishingly entwined against the odds.
Because four years after that day, fate brought them together in very different surroundings – Paris, the city of love. And it sparked the beginning of a lifelong romance.
Now, more than 70 years on, Ryka – who changed her name to Renee – says: “In a sense, we saved each other. He understood what I had been through. And he had suffered too. He knew trauma. He had lost his father in the Blitz.”
The pair enjoyed 50 years of marriage before Charles’s death. They had two children and ran a grocer’s shop in Hendon, North London – their quiet life only ever troubled by the nightmares they shared.
Today Renee gives talks in schools about the Holocaust, telling future generations how she is only here today because of the flick of a hand from Nazi monster Dr Josef Mengele – the Angel of Death – during her time in Auschwitz.
GHETTO
Her ordeal began not long after the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Renee, then 10, and her parents and younger sister were thrown out of their home and left with nothing but the clothes they wore.
They ended up in a Jewish ghetto in Lodz – but without their youngest who was taken away from them by soldiers.
For five years the family starved in terrible squalor until the summer of 1944 when they and thousands of others were crammed into trains bound for what the Germans told them would be a better life.
“They said we were going to working camps where there’d be good food and excellent conditions, with good medical care,” said Renee. Their destination was Auschwitz. When they arrived Renee’s father Szajeck was pulled from the train without even a kiss goodbye. She never saw him again.
Soon Renee had to take part in a “selection” process for experiments being carried out by the infamous Dr Mengele. She and hundreds of others had to file past the monster’s gaze. Those sent right lived, those to the left died.
She recalls: “They sent all the old people, invalids, children and pregnant women to the right. Only the movement of Dr Mengele’s hand determined if you lived or died.”
It was her first stroke of luck since the war began – her next came when Allied bombing flattened Hamburg and she and her mother Sala were transported 460 miles from Auschwitz to help clear rubble.
But in 1945, as the end of the war neared, the pair were sent to Bergen-belsen. Renee sobs as the memories flood back. “Walking to the camp gates, there were bodies everywhere,” she said. “No words can describe the scene. There were skeletons walking around, their eyes bulging from their faces. “They had rags on and the atmosphere was of death. The stench was unbelievable. We expected to die.” She tended to her sick mum as they waited for the end. “Nobody expected to live. My mum said to me, ‘Don’t cry when I am dead’,” she said. “In Belsen, there was no organisation. They didn’t bother counting the people. There was no point. Hundreds would die during the night. The SS guards were