The Holocast Wedding Gown

This is a very interesting story.
The Wedding Gown That Made History!



Lilly Friedman doesn't remember the last name of the woman who designed and sewed the wedding gown she wore when she walked down the aisle over 60 years ago. But the grandmother of seven does recall that when she first told her fiancé Ludwig that she had always dreamed of being married in a white gown he realized he had his work cut out for him.
For the tall, lanky 21-year-old who had survived hunger, disease and torture this was a different kind of challenge. How was he ever going to find such a dress in the Bergen Belsen Displaced Person's camp where they felt grateful for the clothes on their backs?
Fate would intervene in the guise of a former German pilot who walked into the food distribution center where Ludwig worked, eager to make a trade for his worthless parachute. In exchange for two pounds of coffee beans and a couple of packs of cigarettes Lilly would have her wedding gown.
For two weeks Miriam the seamstress worked under the curious eyes of her fellow DPs, carefully fashioning the six parachute panels into a simple, long sleeved gown with a rolled collar and a fitted waist that tied in the back with a bow. When the dress was completed she sewed the leftover material into a matching shirt for the groom.
A white wedding gown may have seemed like a frivolous request in the surreal environment of the camps, but for Lilly the dress symbolized the innocent, normal life she and her family had once led before the world descended into madness. Lilly and her siblings were raised in a Torah observant home in the small town of Zarica, Czechoslovakia where her father was a melamed, respected and well liked by the young yeshiva students he taught in nearby Irsheva.
He and his two sons were marked for extermination immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. For Lilly and her sisters it was only their first stop on their long journey of persecution, which included Plashof, Neustadt, Gross Rosen and finally Bergen Belsen.
Four hundred people marched 15 miles in the snow to the town of Celle on January 27, 1946 to attend Lilly and Ludwig's wedding. The town synagogue, damaged and desecrated, had been lovingly renovated by the DPs with the meager materials available to them. When a Sefer Torah arrived from England they converted an old kitchen cabinet into a makeshift Aron Kodesh.




"My sisters and I lost everything - our parents, our two brothers, our homes. The most important thing was to build a new home." Six months later, Lilly's sister Ilona wore the dress when she married Max Traeger. After that came Cousin Rosie. How many brides wore Lilly's dress? "I stopped counting after 17." With the camps experiencing the highest marriage rate in the world, Lilly's gown was in great demand.

In 1948 when President Harry Truman finally permitted the 100,000 Jews who had been languishing in DP camps since the end of the war to emigrate, the gown accompanied Lilly across the ocean to America. Unable to part with her dress, it lay at the bottom of her bedroom closet for the next 50 years, "not even good enough for a garage sale. I was happy when it found such a good home."

Home was the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. When Lily's niece, a volunteer, told museum officials about her aunt's dress, they immediately recognized its historical significance and displayed the gown in a specially designed showcase, guaranteed to preserve it for 500 years.
But Lilly Friedman's dress had one more journey to make. Bergen Belsen, the museum, opened its doors on October 28, 2007. The German government invited Lilly and her sisters to be their guests for the grand opening. They initially declined, but finally traveled to Hanover the following year with their children, their grandchildren and extended families to view the extraordinary exhibit created for the wedding dress made from a parachute.
Lilly's family, who were all familiar with the stories about the wedding in Celle, were eager to visit the synagogue. They found the building had been completely renovated and modernized. But when they pulled aside the handsome curtain they were astounded to find that the Aron Kodesh, made from a kitchen cabinet, had remained untouched as a testament to the profound faith of the survivors. As Lilly stood on the bimah once again she beckoned to her granddaughter, Jackie, to stand beside her where she was once a kallah. "It was an emotional trip. We cried a lot."

Two weeks later, the woman who had once stood trembling before the selective eyes of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele returned home and witnessed the marriage of her granddaughter.

The three Lax sisters - Lilly, Ilona and Eva, who together survived Auschwitz, a forced labor camp, a death march and Bergen Belsen - have remained close and today live within walking distance of each other in Brooklyn. As mere teenagers, they managed to outwit and outlive a monstrous killing machine, then went on to marry, have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and were ultimately honored by the country that had earmarked them for extinction.

As young brides, they had stood underneath the chuppah and recited the blessings that their ancestors had been saying for thousands of years. In doing so, they chose to honor the legacy of those who had perished by choosing life.




In MEMORIAM - 63 YEARS LATER
It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated with the German and Russian peoples looking the other way!

Now, more than ever, with Iraq, Iran and others, claiming the Holocaust to be 'a myth,' it's imperative to make sure the world never forgets, because there are others who would like to do it again.

Anne Frank Was Storyteller at Nazi Camp

http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/anne-frank-told-stories-to-district-children-at-concentration-camp-survivor-says/19404021?icid=main|main|dl1|link2|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aolnews.com%2Fworld%2Farticle%2Fanne-frank-told-stories-to-district-children-at-concentration-camp-survivor-says%2F19404021








AMSTERDAM (March 17) - Frail, bone-cold and surrounded by death, Jewish teenager Anne Frank did her best to distract younger children from the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp by telling them fairy tales, a Holocaust survivor says.

The account by Berthe Meijer, now 71, of being a 6-year-old inmate of Bergen Belsen offers a rare glimpse of Anne in the final weeks of her life in the German camp, struggling to keep up her own spirits even as she tried to lift the morale of the smaller children.

That Anne had a gift for storytelling was evident from the diary she kept during two years in hiding with her family in Amsterdam. The scattered pages were collected and published after the war in what became the most widely read book to emerge from the Holocaust.

But Meijer's memoir, being published in Dutch later this month, is the first to mention Anne's talent for spinning tales even in the despair of the camp.

The memoir deals with Meijer's acquaintance with Anne Frank in only a few pages, but she said she titled it "Life After Anne Frank" because it continues the tale of Holocaust victims where the famous diary leaves off.

"The dividing line is where the diary of Anne Frank ends. Because then you fall into a big black hole," Meijer told The Associated Press at her Amsterdam home.

Anne's final diary entry was on Aug. 1, 1944, three days before she and her family were arrested. She and her older sister Margot died in March 1945 in a typhus epidemic that swept through Bergen Belsen, just two weeks before the camp was liberated. Anne was 15.

The stories Anne told were "fairy tales in which nasty things happened, and that was of course very much related to the war," Meijer said.

"But as a kid you get lifted out of the everyday nastiness. That's something I remember. You're listening to someone telling something that has nothing to do with what's happening around you - so it's a bit of escape."

In addition to her diary, Frank wrote several essays and fragments of fiction while in hiding, including stories about a fairy and a gnome, though they are usually considered only of historical interest. They have been published as "Tales From the Secret Annex."

The stories she told in the camp were "about princes and elves and those kind of figures," Meijer said. Despite having unhappy twists, the tales were "quite a bit less terrible than what we saw around us. So you thought: they didn't have it so bad. As a child, you think very primitively about that kind of thing."

Around 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands before the 1940-45 Nazi occupation. Of those, 107,000 were deported to Germany and only 5,200 survived.

The Meijers and the Franks were acquaintances before the war: members of both families had fled Germany during the rise of Hitler's regime and found a place in the tightly-knit Jewish community in Amsterdam. The Meijers lived on the same street where Anne attended a Montessori elementary school.

The Franks went into hiding in a secret apartment above a canal-side warehouse where Otto Frank, Anne's father, had his business.

The Meijers hid in their own home, boarding up the windows and hanging a sign on the door that read "contagious disease" to discourage visitors. They were caught in early 1944 and deported from the Netherlands that March. Both of Berthe's parents died at Bergen Belsen in January 1945.

Dr. Alan Hilfer, director of psychology at Maimonides Medical Center in New York, said it's plausible that Meijer would have recognized Frank and stored the memory all these years if she knew her before the war and if she met her again at the camp.

A child of six or seven can "form memories reasonably well and hold on to them, though not in the same way as an adult," he said.

Records obtained by The Associated Press from Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial authority, show that Berthe was an inmate of Bergen Belsen for 13 months until it was liberated in April 1945.

Annemarie Bekker, a spokeswoman for the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam said Berthe Meijer has previously been interviewed by museum historians and she had no reason to doubt Meijer's testimony.

"It could very well be true," Bekker said. "We can't confirm it or deny it."

Hannah Pick-Goslar, a childhood friend of Anne Frank who also met her in Bergen Belsen, said she doubted Meijer's recollection was accurate.

"In that condition, you almost died," she said in a telephone call from her home in Jerusalem. "You had no strength to tell stories."

Meijer acknowledged that her recollections of the Frank sisters were fleeting.

She said there were many reasons she had waited until now to tell her story - not least that she was busy growing up, having a career and raising a family. She said a dedication ceremony at Bergen Belsen in 2006 made her realize how few Dutch survivors are still alive, and that there is little record of the impact the camp had on their later lives.

In addition, she suppressed her memories for years, and the horror of the camps have always been a difficult or taboo subject: at the orphanage where Meijer grew up, in polite company afterward, and even among her fellow survivors.

Still, "you remember a lot at age 7," she said. Meijer turned 7 in April 1945.

"You had to take off your clothes because there were lice in them that spread typhus. And you were wrapped in those blankets. And you sat somewhere in a corner half-frozen."

She said Margot had asked Anne to tell stories to cheer up the children, and that it was difficult for Anne to summon the enthusiasm.

The last time she saw Anne was in the camp infirmary, but they were both sick and "too weak and sad to even be pleasant to each other," she wrote.

In some ways, Meijer grew up to be the person Anne had hoped to be, a journalist, a columnist and an author, albeit of a popular Dutch cookbook.

In her diary Anne wrote in April 1944: "I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. But, and that is the great question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?"

Although Meijer associated with leading Dutch writers and artists, she said she suffered lifelong symptoms of post-traumatic stress, with overwhelming memories and emotions surfacing unexpectedly.

To this day she has a paralyzing fear of crowds and public transportation.

In her book, she wonders about her choices in marrying first a gifted, but alcoholic architect and later one of the Netherlands' most famed journalists - not coincidentally, another Bergen Belsen survivor.

She says she can laugh "through the tears" about having become a culinary expert years after fantasizing endlessly about food while starving at the camp.

She describes how the simple act of cleaning sauce from a pan with her finger can trigger the ambiguously pleasant memory of being allowed to lick one of the camp's enormous cooking vats.

And she proudly shows off a concealed crawl space behind an opening in her cellar where she could hide if need be.

In history books, "the war ends when we were liberated. No. Not for a lot of people," she says.

"Not for the lives of the people who survived those camps or went into hiding or had traumatic experiences because of that war. Those things, they don't go away."