In January 1943, Luba Tryszynska arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp alongside her husband Hersch and their little boy Isaac.
She was a Polish Jewish woman whose whole world revolved around her family. On the cold selection platform, Nazi guards tore the toddler from her arms.
Little Isaac was sent straight to his death.
Shortly after, her husband was separated from her and killed. Luba was left entirely alone in the darkness of the camp, forced to live with an agonizing question.
Why was she still alive when everyone she loved was gone?
In late 1944, the Nazis transferred Luba to the Bergen-Belsen camp. It was a place where starvation, freezing cold, and diseases killed hundreds of people every day.
In December of that year, something unusual happened near her barracks.
Dozens of abandoned children suddenly appeared.
They were the young sons and daughters of Dutch Jewish families who had been split apart during transport. The adults had been sent away to other camps, leaving the tiny children alone in the freezing mud without protection, food, or anyone to look after them.
Luba heard their soft crying in the dark and went outside to look. Standing in the cold were children far too young to understand why the world had abandoned them.
She could have easily turned away and closed her door. In Bergen-Belsen, trying to help anyone else meant risking your own survival.
Finding a single scrap of bread was nearly impossible, and hiding dozens of kids could mean immediate execution.
Instead, she opened the door and brought them inside.
"Come in, you are safe with me now," Luba whispered as she gathered the shivering toddlers into her arms.
With the help of a few other women in the barracks, she began searching everywhere for extra food. She shared her own microscopic rations, washed the children whenever she found clean water, and hid them whenever the guards walked past.
The little ones quickly learned to stay completely silent when danger was near, even when hunger was tearing at their stomachs.
Luba gave them much more than shelter and physical protection. She gave them maternal warmth and hope. Years later, when people asked her why she risked everything for strangers, she explained her choice with a simple truth.
"I gave them my love because I had lost my own son," she said.
On April 15, 1945, British soldiers arrived and liberated Bergen-Belsen. They discovered around 60,000 survivors living in horrific conditions, alongside thousands of unburied bodies. But inside one of the wooden barracks, they found Luba and her small army of young children.
They were weak, thin, and exhausted, but they were breathing. Out of the 46 children Luba had taken under her wing, 44 survived until the day of liberation.
After the war ended, Luba personally accompanied several of the children back to the Netherlands before eventually moving to the United States to rebuild her life.
For decades, she spoke very little about what happened in the camp. Then, in 1995, an incredible reunion took place in Amsterdam. Thirty-one of those saved children returned to see her again.
They were full-grown adults now, many of them parents and grandparents.
Some learned for the very first time that day that their childhood camp companions had also survived. The city presented Luba with a medal for her humanitarian bravery, but her real reward was sitting right in front of her.
Luba Tryszynska-Frederick passed away in 2009 at the age of 91. Her little Isaac never came back, but dozens of children walked out of Bergen-Belsen alive because a grieving mother chose to open her heart when everything else was lost.
As Luba looked around the room in Amsterdam, seeing bright smiles, warm hugs, and newborn babies held by the adults she once sheltered in the dark, she knew her love had won.
The darkness of Bergen-Belsen could never erase the light of forty-four living legacies who grew up to fill the world with love.
Standing among the thriving families that existed only because she cared, Luba smiled through her tears and knew her tiny Isaac was never truly forgotten. Every joyful laugh from every grandchild in that room was a sweet, eternal victory of love over hatred.
>We Are Human Angels<
Authors
Awakening the Human Spirit
We are the authors of 'We Are Human Angels,' the book that has spread a new vision of the human experience and has been spontaneously translated into 14 languages by readers.
**I just checked and the book not avaliable in the Surrey Public Library**
**It was British and Canadian soldiers that liberated Bergen-Belsen. My uncle, Bill Parker, was one of the Canadians who was part of the liberation. According to his daughter, Dale, the sights he saw haunted him for the rest of his life. **
