How a caring Scot came to rescue of Auschwitz survivors
Daily Record
27 JAN 2010 Updated 1 JUL 2012
By Annie BrownTHEY were among the lucky few who staggered out of the dreadful gates of Auschwitz when it was liberated 65 years ago today.
But Jews from the Romanian town of Targu Mures returned home to face another dreadful fate... grinding poverty.
Ten years ago, a Scots woman came across their appalling living conditions and decided she just had to do something.
When she got back to Glasgow, Ethne Woldman contacted other Jewish supporters and they formed the Targu Mures Trust.
Over the years, it has provided financial assistance, medicine, home comforts and care for 200 former inmates of the Nazi death camp.
Ethne, the chief executive of Jewish Care Scotland, was with a delegation from East Renfrewshire Council to Targu Mures in 2000.
When she asked if there was a Jewish community, she was horrified by what she was shown.
Holocaust survivors, all over 75, buying bread by the slice, one old lady living in a chicken coop with no water or electricity, and all surviving hand to mouth.
Ethne said: "I have been in social work all my life but had never seen people living the way they were.
"They were forced to make a decision between medicine and food. Even by Romanian standards, they were poor."
When Ethne offered to help, they told her just to send a few pairs of old specs, too proud to ask for anything substantial. Ethne said: "I felt we had to be able to do better than that."
Just as important as the material aid the trust provides is the extended family it offers to the Jews of Targu Mures, many of whom had lost every living relative in the camps.
Before the Nazis came, 6000 Jews lived in the town. Almost 5500 died in Auschwitz. The Jewish school of 350 pupils was emptied and the children were all killed.
When the few survivors returned, they found their homes occupied and all their possessions gone.
Many never remarried, some did but decided not to have children and others had been sterilised in the camps.
But as custodians of such a dark but important part of history, it was essential that they were able to pass on their stories.
For Ethne, perhaps her closest bond was with Bella Steinmetz, who died aged 98 on New Year's Day last year.
Ethne said: "She was part of my family. It is as simple as that. She was like a grandmother to my family and of huge importance to us. She had us as her extended family and we had her as someone we loved dearly."
Bella had grown up in an upper middle-class family and life had been good before the war turned her world upside down.
She was a glamorous young lady who travelled to Budapest to buy the latest gowns from Europe.
She married well, to young dentist Andor Almasi, and was completely in love.
When the Germans swept through Romania, they took young men such as Andor. She never found out where he had been killed.
A German captain was billeted with Bella's family and he was captivated by her beauty. When the Jews of Targu Mures were deported to a makeshift ghetto in a nearby brick factory, the German officer kept her back and tried to protect her.
But Bella didn't want to be the only Jew left. Naively, she pleaded with him to just let her go, thinking that they would probably just be resettled.
She left valuable jewellery in the officer's safekeeping, taking odd bits and pieces with her.
When she and her family arrived at the ghetto, it was so crowded that there was no space for them.
So in the pouring rain, Bella and her mum slept outside in the mud, her life of luxury already a faded memory.
On May 4, 1944, they were deported to Auschwitz and their torture began.
Bella talked little of the details of her capture. But her mother was killed in the gas chambers on their arrival and Bella was so badly beaten that she was never able to swallow properly again.
Somehow she survived and when the camp was liberated, she and 7000 others were simply left to find their own way home.
She returned to her old house at Targu Mures, but a new family was happily living there.
They slammed the door in her face after telling her they hadn't been expecting any Jews to come back.
Before she left for the camp, she had buried two trinkets her father had given her - a small Star of David and a little gold charm for a child's bracelet - in the garden.
On her return, Bella dug them up and wore the Star of David until her dying day. A few years ago, she gave the charm to Ethne so she could pass it on to her own granddaughter.
Ethne still gets emotional about it.
She said: "Bella said if I gave the charm to my granddaughter, it would always stay in a Jewish family.
"So I did. It still makes me cry, thinking about it."
Bella had married again. The first had been the result of a great love, but the second was born out of loneliness which grew to be much more.
When the Russians took over Targu Mures after the war, Bella feared the Communists would persecute the Jews.
For that reason, she chose never to have children.
In Judaism, it is important to honour your dead parents and pass on their names to keep their memory alive.
Every New Year, children should go to the cemetery to pay respects to their parents. The survivors of Auschwitz didn't have a date for their parents' death, no children to inherit their names and no grave at which to pay their respects.
In the cemetery in Targu Mures, there is a Hebrew inscription on a memorial which reads "And the Lord said I will give to these bones a new breath of life."
But it is soap that lies beneath it, not bones.
The soap was made with the fat of Jews exterminated in the camp.
Each bar was imprinted with the initials RJF - Reine Jüdisch Fett, Pure Jewish Fat.
Ethne said: "Many communities have acquired a bar of this soap and buried it in the cemetery. In Targu Mures, they pray where it is buried."
For the town's survivors, it will be left to Ethne and the trust to follow the Jewish traditions of remembrance for them.
Ethne said: "We will always remember and say prayers for them."
And perhaps that has been their greatest gift of all.
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