Rebecca-Branca Lissauer (later Elizur) was born in 1934 in Amsterdam, to Jack, a textile merchant, and Rosalie-Rachel. She had an older brother, Joop-Joshua.
When Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, Rebecca was in the first grade.
In the summer of 1942, the family was arrested. "Mother told us to prepare a bag," Rebecca remembers. "One night, we were taken from our home to the Jewish Theater in Amsterdam. I cried all night." The family was taken to the Amersfoort camp and from there to the Westerbork transit camp, where, from the summer of 1942, deportation trains left weekly for the extermination camps in Eastern Europe.
"We stood by the departing trains and waved goodbye. The adults around me would cry because they knew that whoever went on those trains would never return."
The Jews imprisoned in Westerbork lived in constant fear of being included in the list of deportees. A few months later, the Lissauer family was put on the list, but because Jack had a British passport, they were assigned to be exchanged for Germans held by the Western Allies. Instead of being sent to the East, the family was deported to Bergen-Belsen, where the exchange candidates were concentrated.
"We were deported like animals. We were on top of one another, with no place to breathe. People relieved themselves on top of each other. From the windows we saw people at the railway stations, ordinary people, well-dressed. It made no sense."
In the camp, Rebecca and her mother were separated from her father and brother. "Mother would encourage the other prisoners, saying, 'What they are doing to us – it will end, because it cannot be that we are being abused for nothing. We should take courage, and hope and believe that we will survive this.' It helped a lot of people. "
"We suffered from terrible hunger. We craved food. When I saw a woman eating bread, I could not stop looking at her, until she scolded me. My mother kept faith even when she was very weak, and suffered from diseases due to malnutrition. We had to stand for roll-call every day when they counted us over and over, as if someone could run away. We danced in the cold to keep warm."
In April 1945, Rebecca and her family were taken by train to an unknown destination. During the journey, the train was bombed, and the passengers jumped off the train and lay on the ground. "Mother protected our heads with her hands and told us to repeat our names, the names of our parents and our dates of birth, in case she was killed." A few days later, the prisoners were liberated by the Red Army.
"My parents went looking for food. Father came back with a violin. Mother came back with a doll for me, because I loved dolls so much and all those years I had no dolls."
Most of Rebecca's family members were murdered in the Holocaust.
After liberation, the family returned to Amsterdam, where Rebecca studied social work. In 1959, she immigrated to Israel and worked, among other things, supporting Dutch immigrants.
Rebecca and Dov have two daughters, nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
