Surviving the Nazi Holocaust

I also recall visiting a restaurant in Austria in 1953 - I was wearing an Indian sari, and an elderly man bowed, raised his glass in a toast to me and declaimed: "Your Gandhi, mein Hitler"! How he equated Gandhi, that pioneer of non-violence as a political strategy, with Hitler was incomprehensible, but eight years after the war had ended, he was clearly still an unreconstructed Nazi.

Near the end of the WW II in 1945, Celia was rescued by the Swedish Red Cross and put on a train to Sweden (via Denmark) where she was carefully nursed back to health after being on the brink of starvation. Celia says that if she had not been rescued, she would have been killed by the Nazis who were desperate to eliminate the evidence and the witnesses to their atrocities.

Celia's rescue - and that of Rena Roth - was part of the initiative of Swedish diplomat, Count Folke Bernadotte, nephew of the Swedish king, who negotiated with the Nazis the release of some 3l,000 concentration camp prisoners in exchange for trucks.

Like a post-script to the stories of Rena and Celia, I was recently contacted by Rena's step-son, Michael. He said there was some interest in the US in making a film about Count Bernadotte. and perhaps the books "Gizela" and "Becoming CELIA: The story of Häftling 46996". might get a mention.

After the war, Bernadotte was unanimously chosen to be the United Nations Security Council mediator in the Arab–Israeli conflict of 1947–1948. He was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948 by members of the Stern gang, an organization of radical Zionists who had committed numerous attacks over a period of years against the British and Arabs. They did not like his recommendation that Jerusalem should be under international supervision. Despite his rescue of so many concentration camp prisoners, whether Bernadotte should be honoured as "Righteous Among the Nations" is still a matter of controversy in Israel.

In India, Gandhi too was assassinated by a radical Hindu who did not like his conciliatory attitude towards Muslims. As I said before, no nation has a monopoly on virtue or vice, but there are good people in the world. Celia writes: "The Red Cross people spoke to us in German, Polish, Yiddish and English. They told us 'You are safe now, under us. Don't worry'. We laughed and screamed and cried. I weighed less than 30 kilograms and was just about dead. My clothes were rags, filthy.... We were kept on an open bitumen space, like a tarmac, not far from the train station. I could barely stand but desperately tried to because in my mind I still believed that sitting down got you shot......but the Red Cross ladies gently assured us we could sit. Once I sat down I could not stand again. I was picked up and carried to the train by a Danish student working for the underground...."

Now Celia is a regular at our local hydrotherapy pool, and frequently brings me some home-baked cake because she thinks I need nourishment.