Category:Kinderbaracke Belsen (subject)

The Kinderbaracke Belsen (children’s barrack), was a place of refugee for almost 100 children at Bergen-Belsen.

Overview

The children’s barrack was apparently run by the Nazis as a showplace for the International Red Cross.

While the children were supposed to be under sixteen to live in the compound, at least two of them seemed to be older; they had lied about their ages so as to remain with their younger siblings.

The facility was managed by Luba Tryszynska, herself a Jewish prisoner from a town in eastern Poland that is now in Belarus; when she spoke Polish it was with a marked Russian accent, and she seemed to pass for Russian. She was assisted by two other Jewish women: Hermina Krantz, from Slovakia (though I remember thinking at the time that she was from Czechia), and Hadassah (Ada) Bimko, from Sosnowiec, Poland, who had studied medicine in France before the war and served as the doctor for the compound.

In addition to the parentless children overseen by Luba and her assistants, the barrack also housed, across the hall from them, young women with infants of their own.

In the last months of the camp, Luba Tryszynska rounded up 54 Dutch children, none older than 14, who had come to the camp without their parents. Thanks to her personal crusade to keep them alive, 52 survived until the camp in northern Germany was liberated by British troops on April 15, 1945.

With them was also a group of around 30 children from Poland and Slovakia, including Coby Lubliner and Yidele Henechowicz, and a group or pregnant women.

Luba Tryszynska is here with a group of children. Yehuda Danzig is the child with the darker cap, his brother Michael Danzig has a lighter cap

• Hetty Verolme / Esther Werkendam (1930)
• Samuel Max Werkendam (1931) "Max"
• Zadok Werkendam (1933) "Jack"

• Jack Cohen-Rodriguez (1930) Westerbork Bergene-Belsen
• Gerry Lakmaker (1933) ?