The Family Unit during the Holocaust - March 2010

IntroductionDiscussing the subject of the family unit during the Holocaust raises many issues of devastation as well as strength. Professor Dalia Ofer shares many insights about this in an article published in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. She explains that the Holocaust devastated families and Jewish life in general. Nevertheless, there was also considerable strength in family ties. Evidence reveals that some fragments of families remained intact, in ghettos, and in labor and extermination camps, and those who didn’t have family members, created their own alternative...

Please introduce yourself and give us a brief overview of your life.

My name you know is Dukie Gelber. I’m from Holland originally. I’m nearly 77 and I have been under German occupation for five years. In 1940 they invaded Holland and I’ve been 2 years in German concentration camps. About half a year in Westerbork which was the main transition camp concentration camp in Holland, [from] which about 109,000 Dutch Jews went to the east. Somewhere around 5,000 came back after the war. And I have been a year and four months in Bergen- Belsen and another two months after the...

“The first great tragedy. People are harnessed to bundles which they drag across the pavement. People fall, bundles scatter. Before me a woman bends under her bundle. From the bundle a thin string of rice keeps pouring over the street…I think of nothing: not what I am losing, not what I have just lost, not what is in store for me. I do not see the streets before me, the people passing by. I only feel that I am terribly weary, I feel that an insult, a hurt is burning inside me. Here is the ghetto gate. I feel that I have been robbed, my freedom is being robbed from me, my home, and...