‘We didn’t know what it meant to be free’
Yehuda Danzig, 82, recognized a photo of himself as a boy at an internment camp in a newspaper report from Israel
The image is deceptively cheerful.
Taken in April 1945, it shows a dozen or so children smiling through a barbed wire fence. They are prisoners at Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi Germany concentration camp, and they have just been liberated.
Yehuda Danzig, 82, recognized two boys in the picture after it was recently published in the Times of Israel. One was him at the age of11. The other was his brother Michael, who was 12 at the time.
It was the first and only photo he’d seen of himself as a prisoner.
“I started to cry,” says the soft-spoken Danzig. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Danzig had been in the kitchen reading the newspaper on his tablet when the black-and-white still frame caught his eye. It was taken from the Holocaust documentary German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, shot at 14 different camps and sites of atrocities in Austria, Germany and Poland, including Auschwitz, after the fall of Hitler.
Though parts of the footage have been shown over the years, the film, directed with the help of Alfred Hitchcock, wasn’t completed until 2014, after the British Imperial War Museums took over its restoration.
Danzig refuses to watch it, but says its existence validates the nightmare he suffered through.
“The more people know about it, the better. You don’t realize the inhumanity of people,” he says from the couch of his North York apartment dressed in a grey argyle sweater and dress pants, his eyes cast downward.
Danzig was interred at Bergen-Bel- sen in northern Germany with his brother Michael, stepmother, and a half-brother and half-sister in August 1944, after the family was removed from their home in Zlate Moravce, Czechoslovakia.
They survived other camps and a death march together before Danzig’s father was sent to Buchenwald, another Nazi camp, where he died, and his older sister was institutionalized.
To Danzig, Bergen-Belsen was a “starvation camp.”
Everyone was given one slice of black bread a day; being little meant that Danzig’s ration could get stolen. Sometimes, there was “soup,” made from raw potatoes pulled from the ground.
Prisoners slept on stacked bunks, as many as five of them piled on top of one another. They were rounded up for a daily head count to determine who had died the previous day. Guards watched from towers above, machine guns protruding from their posts. “People were dying like flies, standing one minute, the next minute they were on the ground dead.”
They suffered from typhus, says Danzig, and “were covered in lice, from head to toe. “We were like zombies.” On April 15, 1945, a British solider arrived in their bunks.
“He said ‘You are free.’ We didn’t know what it meant to be free.”
Danzig and his family were transferred to a military camp where they were fed and given medical attention.
They discovered that their entire extended family — a group of about 30 uncles, aunts and cousins — had all been killed.
In 1948, Danzig and his brother Michael were taken to the U.K. as orphans (their birth mother had died during childbirth) and in August were relocated to Canada. The rest of the family settled in Israel.
In Toronto, Danzig was placed in foster care and attended school, go-
“The more people know about it, the better. You don’t realize the inhumanity of people.” YEHUDA DANZIG HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR
ing on to become director of the Jewish National Fund of Canada. He met a woman named Etty at a local Jewish organization and they married in 1958, having two sons, Mark and Ian. Danzig never spoke of the Holocaust, not even with Michael, who died in 2014 due to complications related to Hepatitis B.
“It’s too painful,” says Danzig. “I wanted to forget that part of history.”
But he never did, and still thinks about it every day, still wakes up from the occasional bad dream.
“It did happen,” he says, his hazel eyes glassy. “And it’s for no reason. No reason why six million people had to be exterminated just because they were Jewish.”