Family Name: Barber

Previous Family Name: Baum

First Name: Edith

Father's Name: Ya'akov

Mother's Name: Hana

Year of Birth: 1932

Country of Birth:The Netherlands

City of Birth: Amsterdam

Edith Barber was an only child born in 1932 in Amsterdam. Her parents were immigrants.  Her father Ya'akov from Germany and mother, Hana from Poland . They lived in a nice apartment at Ruysdael Straat 20.

Although Edith spoke only Dutch, her father spoke both Dutch and German (in the house) and Edith's mother spoke both Dutch and Polish.  79,000 Jews lived in Amsterdam at that time, almost 10% of the city's population. Like the Barbers more than 10,000Jews  were foreigners who had found refuge in Amsterdam in the 1930s.  Her father manufactured clothing and her mother was a housewife.

The Barber family were well to do and lived a good life. Her father worked for they They were a traditional family and her father was very religious but Edith did not go to a Jewish school. She attended a private school because there was no Jewish school in the neighborhood.

Life during the war

Edith does not remember any changes in the family's life when the Nazis started the war on September 1, 1939 until the time they occupied Netherlands on May 10, 1940. The Dutch were not violent to the Jews but Edith remembers that Germans started passing laws and marching through Amsterdam so her family went to the city of Harlem for a couple days and then came back to Amsterdam.  The Nazis invaded to the Netherlands on May 10^th 1940, when she was 8 years old, but Edith did not feel any dramatic change in their life until they were taken in 1943 to the concentration camp. Edith's father bought a permit that allowed them to stay in their house and life was not far from normal- she went to school, there was no need for extra food, she did not feel any fear or anxiety and her father had been working as usual.

Her father had the chance to hide the family with some Christian friends, but he refused to hide. He said that the he believed in God and God would help him. Edith's father had many Christian friends from work. One of whom let them come to his house to listen to the radio because after the Nazis had occupied Amsterdam, the Jews were forbidden to listen to the radio.

Edith had to go to school wearing a yellow Star of David patch on her clothes.

During

Then, on a Thursday evening in January 1943, someone knocked on the door and commanded that they come with him. They were taken to the theatre where they stayed a couple of days with other Jews from the same region. From there they were transferred to Vought- a region in the southern part of the Netherlands used as a concentration camp by the Nazis. They were the first transport to arrive. They stayed there almost a year there until December 1943. The permit did not help anymore and they were on their own. At 11 years of age, Edith started to work sewing furs and shaping women eyebrows in the sewing workshop. In July-August most of the camp had been transferred to Poland but Edith's family had not been taken from the camp. They got food packages in Vought. Edith's father ate only Kosher which Edith and her mother ate, so she did not feel any hunger at that time, but her father who ate only kosher did not eat them. In December 1943 they were transferred to Birkenau.

Birkenau

In December 1943 they were taken by train to Birkenau- Lager A, in Poland, where they stayed a couple of days under crowded conditions. When they arrived it was very cold and snowing and Edith was taken to the camp. Edith was with three more girls- there was no selection, her hair was not shaved and her clothes were not taken from her.

In Birkenau, Edith was with her mother and other women and girls. All the other women were shaved and wore a black and white shirt (including Edith's mother).  The conditions were not horrible- she was not working, and every day they took a walk (everybody walked together in a row). They got some bread and soup, but that was enough for Edith, she was not hungry. But slowly, everybody got dysentery and a lot of the women died.

 Edith also got sick and she survived but her mother did not survive the dysentery. After a month, most of the women in the lager died, and Edith slept with the Slovakian blockalteste (the woman in charge of the block) - because she was alone and she knew some German. After that, a lot of twins were brought into the camp so the Nazis could experiment on them. A new block had been made for the children and Edith also went to that block. At that time, she contracted hepatitis and then scarlet fever so she slept at the Rivier(infirmary). She was released one day before all the sick people who had been there were sent on a transport.

At that time she was 11 years old.

Auschwitz and the death march

At the end of 1944, Edith was transferred to Auschwitz. where there was a roll call every day with the SS but the rest of the time the Kapos were in charge, who were even worse than the SS.

In January 1945, the whole camp was evacuated, except the children and sick who could choose to leave or to stay. Edith thought that if she had stayed, the SS would kill her, so she went with the whole camp. The SS soldiers marched them for two days and one night. Edith said that it was very difficult because it was winter in Poland, which is very cold, and it snowed- when they were thirsty they ate snow. Anyone sat down and could not get up he got shot so she would not rest.

After the march they were crowded onto roofless coal cars, they rode for a week stopping from time to time so they could get out of the car and eat some snow.

Ravensbreuck

After a week in the coal car, Edith and the other Jews arrived at Ravensbreuck Concentration Camp in Germany, 90 km north of Berlin near the village of Ravensbruck.

There were a lot of Jews from many places and transports. The conditions were very bad, so when she had a chance, Edith went on a transport train to Neustadt Gleiwe, which was a work camp located in Germany. While she was there Edith was very sick so she rested. They barely got food and Edith had bronchitis which made her feel very bad most of the time she was there.

The liberation- life after the war

In March 1945 the Russians "liberated" the Jews in Neustadt Gleiwe. Edith said that she saw the Russian tanks come into the camp and Russian soldiers gave her a sausage- she was so hungry she finished it by herself but they were not yet release. The Russian soldiers took them from camp to camp until they the Americans freed them.

As Edith moved from to camp to camp, she hoped to get to the United States to live with her uncle. But, she was informed that she needed to go to Belgium. So she went to Antwerp where she stayed with a nice Jewish Slovakian family , named Warrmont who adopted Edith.

They sent her to live near the sea in a children's house for a while because she then had bronchitis. After that she went back to live with the Slovakian family until one day when she was informed that her uncle, aunt and cousin in Holland were alive. Her cousin worked in the Jewish community. She went to live with her uncle in Amsterdam for one year. She started attending  the Zionist youth organization "Sha'ar Yeshuv" and decided to immigrate to Palestine. While she was in Holland she went to a Mizrachi high school youth Aliyah, [ a Jewish organization that saved a lot of lives]. She immigrated to Palestine in February 1948 with Aliyah D'. She has a Dutch passport so she went to Palestine through Marseille, France with youth Aliyah. She reached Palestine on a Russian boat and she stayed at her uncle's house on Akiva Street in "Hadare Hacarmel", Haifa. Her uncle and aunt's names were Yulia and Leo.

After a period of adjusment, she became a hairdresser, left her uncle's house and moved to Givataim. In 1950 she was drafted into the Nahal Army Corps.

In 1951 she left the army and married Ilan Barber. he was born in Germany and immigrated to Palestine before the war. He lived on Kibbutz Kedma in the Negev and was a carpenter at the Dead Sea Works.

During the War of Independence he served as a carpenter in the Navy at Haifa. After the war he moved to Givataim to live with his parents.

 They had two boys-  Ya'akov and Amnon.

Belgium

Belgium is a federal monarchy in Western Europe, which has boundaries with Netherlands, German and France. Belgium was conquered by the Nazis in May 1940. 65,000 and 70,000 Jews lived in Belgium, primarily in Antwerp and Brussels at that time.

The Germans had deported nearly 25,000 Jews from Belgium to the Auschwitz Extermination camp, most of whom were murdered between 1942-1944. 

After the war, Antwerp, which had already had a sizable Jewish population before the war, once again became a major European centre of Haredi (and particularly Hasidic) Orthodox Judaism. About 15,000 Haredi Jews mainly Hasidic lived in Antwerp.

Amsterdam 

Amsterdam is the capital city of Netherlands, which is a country in North West Europe, near Germany and Belgium.

Edith Baum was born in Amsterdam in Netherlands. Amsterdam was (and still is) the biggest city in Netherlands, and populated most of the Jews that lived in Netherlands. Almost 80,000 Jews lived in Amsterdam before the Holocaust, which is more than a half of the Jews in whole Netherlands. At the beginning of the war, Netherlands hoped to stay neutral. But in 10^th of May 1940, the Nazis invaded and occupied Netherlands.

The North of Netherlands is a long coast strep. After the war, Edith lived near the coast for a while and couple of years later she made an "Aliyah". Thousands of the Jews from Netherlands that survived the Holocaust made an "Aliyah"- about 25% of them.