The Holocaust survivors who lived in the Romanian town of Targu Mures were sceptical when a group of Scots arrived offering help. Too many times visitors had pledged their support and delivered nothing more than empty promises.
Since they had emerged starved and brutalised from the liberation of the Nazi death camps they had become a forgotten people.
By some miracle they had survived the systematic murder of six million of their fellow Jews yet their struggle had been far from over.
Many of the camp victims had lost their entire families; everything they once owned was gone and for some who then found themselves trapped behind the Iron Curtain only loneliness and crushing poverty lay beyond their emancipation.
It is 25 years since Ethne Woldman, chief executive of Jewish Care Scotland, travelled to the Transylvanian town of Targu Mures and discovered hundreds of former camp inmates were living hand to mouth.
To her horror she found one 85-year-old woman living out her final years in a tiny chicken coop with no water or electricity.
Others she met had so little money they bought bread by the slice while neighbours were sharing one pair of spectacles to a block of apartments.
Men and women who had endured the hell of camps such as Auschwitz were living on as little as £11 a month and were often forced to choose between food and medicine. Some were rendered housebound because they couldn’t afford a basic walking aid.
Ethne, 79, had travelled to the town as part of a delegation from East Renfrewshire Council on a mercy mission to help tackle the Romanian orphanage crisis when she had asked if there was a Jewish community she could visit locally.
Children survivors of Auschwitz, wearing adult-size prisoner jackets, stand behind a barbed wire fence
More than a million people, most of them Jewish, were murdered at Auschwitz (pictured)
World leaders will gather today to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (pictured)
One local, not realising Ethne was a Jew, flippantly told her that Targu Mures had ‘solved the Jewish problem years ago’ – a reflection of the area’s ingrained antisemitism.
When she eventually tracked down the community Ethne was appalled that traumatised victims of state-sanctioned genocide were suffering in such dire circumstances. She felt compelled to do something.
Before she left Targu Mures Ethne, who had spent a career in social work, consulted the survivors on what would help.
Proud and dignified, their needs may have been great but their asks were small; perhaps the visitors could bring back some old spectacles and unwanted medicines if they were not out of date?
In truth they didn’t hold out much hope that any assistance would be forthcoming but on her return to Scotland Ethne rallied the help of her own Jewish community in Glasgow and they answered her call.
Colin Black, an ophthalmologist, offered to help source glasses, businessman and philanthropist Dr David Walton pledged a significant donation and retired managing director David Bishop threw himself into anything that was needed.
This core band, together with other supporters, formed the Targu Mures Trust and, until the death of the last Holocaust survivor in the town last year, they worked tirelessly to fulfil their pledge to support the group they had grown to love like family. At one point they assisted more than 250 survivors, not only Jews, providing them with home help, medical and financial aid.
Now a new book An Unbreakable Bond looks back on the history of the Trust, honouring their work and the survivors whose lives were so enhanced by it.
The camp was set up by Nazi German occupiers in southern Poland in 1940 and liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945
Its author Sharon Mail had covered the Trust as a journalist with the Jewish Telegraph and she travelled to the town to meet the survivors for herself.
She said: ‘The idea of Holocaust survivors living under desperate circumstances was something that deeply troubled me.
‘As a Jew I had grown up hearing the tales of the horrors that had befallen millions of fellow Jews and others in Europe.
‘I had seen images of skeletal, dehumanised bodies piled high like rubble, sunken faces in striped pyjamas staring hauntingly through barbed wire and human smoke billowing from the gas chambers.
‘I’ve always been haunted by the thought, as far as it’s possible to imagine, of what it must have been like to experience the Holocaust, particularly for those sent to the concentration and labour camps.
‘The small number who did survive should have been able to continue their lives in comfort, free from hunger, deprivation and fear. To have suffered so much should have meant for them an end to hardship save for the incalculable physical and emotional scars they bore.’
But that was neither the case for the survivors of Targu Mures nor for so many like them in communities across Europe where the same prejudices which fuelled the Holocaust prevailed. Under the tyrannical Soviet dictatorships of Eastern Europe many of the Jews, as well as Roma, survived the Holocaust only to find themselves once more under oppression; some were even detained in slave labour camps.
In Romania, historically a fiercely antisemitic country, Jews were already being persecuted and murdered years before the Nazis marched into Targu Mures in 1944 and began the deportations to the camps of Jews, Roma, communists, homosexuals and the disabled.
Barbed-wire fence and barracks of the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz
Before the war there was a Jewish community of 6,000 in the town, 15 per cent of the population, but almost 5,500 died in the Holocaust – most of them transported to Auschwitz in 1944.
After the war the antisemite Nicolae Ceausescu ruled the country in tyranny between 1965 and 1989 and he only allowed Jews to emigrate to Israel in exchange for a ransom of more than £3,000 a head.
With the mass emigration of Romanian Jews to Israel and elsewhere, only a tiny proportion of mainly elderly community members were left behind in Targu Mures.
Sharon said: ‘They lived their lives with dignity and without complaint feeling that they were lucky simply to be alive when so many others had perished. They didn’t think that anyone would be interested in helping them.
‘But a beautiful bond developed between the community in Targu Mures and the Trust and supporters in Glasgow.’ Today the world will mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and it will be commemorated as part of Holocaust Memorial Day.
For Ethne it will be a time to reflect on the survivors who shared with her their testimonies of unimaginable atrocity.
She will think of those who the Trust visited many times over the years, including Leopold Karpelesz, a survivor of the concentration camp Buchenwald. He was a strong, athletic man full of grace and charm.
On one visit she remembers Leopold told her a remarkable story about how his daughter brought him home a booklet from Buchenwald after she had gone there to see it for herself.
A giant tent covering the ‘Death Gate’ of the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz. It forms part of the preparations for the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation
Angrily, he had snapped that he didn’t need a pamphlet to understand the unspeakable tortures of the camp, and days passed before he grudgingly opened it. His eyes fell on an image taken on April 11, 1945, the day Buchenwald was finally liberated.
It had been taken at the gates of the camp by an American soldier and featured prisoners standing expressionless as the troops arrived.
As he studied it, Leopold was stunned to find that in the middle of the gathered crowd was a grey speck that he recognised as himself.
He recalled that he had been 20 years old and had wandered over to investigate the commotion and on the way discovered the most precious of finds, a tin bucket of boiled potatoes.
The bucket was visible by his side in the picture.
That moment he had been so starved that the importance of the potatoes far outweighed any prospect of liberation and he turned his back on the open gates to freedom and scurried to a prison barrack to eat the food. He wept as he shared with Ethne his enduring shame that he had refused the pleas of sick prisoners to share the potatoes.
‘That is how starvation had changed me,’ he told Ethne.
Leopold said he always knew he would survive the camps but by the time liberation came he had lost everyone he loved.
The Gate of Death at the former Nazi-German Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp
His father Aron, mother Ilona and brothers Samuel, Isador and Isaac were all dead.
Leopold’s oldest brother, Isador, had already been sent to a forced labour camp when the rest of the family were deported. He never returned.
When the family arrived in Auschwitz, Ilona was separated from her husband and sons and Leopold saw her once on the train when he was allowed to take her some water; for the last time he caught sight of her again at a distance across the camp. The baby of the family, six-year-old Isaac, was rejected by the guards for being too small for a six-mile march they were to embark on and his father begged to be allowed to stay with him.
Perhaps they died together. Finally Leopold was sent to Germany and ultimately to Buchenwald where he was separated from Samuel.
The Karpelesz family but for him were gone. But when Leopold died in September 2022 aged 98 he had lived a long and loving life with his wife of 58 years Bertha, their three daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Despite all that he had endured he emphasised to Ethne that he had never lost his faith in people.
‘I will always believe in the love of people, the kindness of friends and family. That always remains,’ he told her.
What struck the Trust was the dignity and the optimism of the survivors and their generosity. They would insist on laying on a spread of cakes and coffee for their visitors which they could ill afford.
Ruins of barracks chimneys at the former Nazi-German Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp
Many had been well educated, cultured and wealthy before the war but they returned from the camps to find their homes had been occupied and they had no hope of reclaiming them.
When Marta Marmor was deported to the death camps she had been a beautiful 18-year-old from a rich family who had been privately educated at a top boarding school.
When the war was over the family’s wealth was gone and she was poor. The Trust had assisted her with medical expenses and a home help.
Marta had been raised by loving parents – Bela Grun and his wife Iren – and she adored her little brother Laszlo, three years her junior.
In 1944, the Nazis ordered the family to the Targu Mures ghetto housed in a former brick factory.
Marta’s mother was brutally beaten and by the time the family were transported to Auschwitz a month later her hair had turned grey and she could barely walk.
Although she was only 45 she looked so old she was immediately selected for the gas chamber when they arrived at the camp.
Marta, who was separated from Bela and Laszlo, was starved and forced to work, cleaning open latrines in temperatures below freezing.
Marta Marmor was deported to the death camps at 18-years-old
Marta and her younger brother before the war
Throughout the torture of the camps she thought constantly of her family; in her heart she knew her mother was dead but she knew nothing of her father and brother.
After liberation, she travelled to Cluj, a large city in Romania where she had relatives who had survived by hiding in a Jewish hospital.
Every day she went to the train station hoping to find camp survivors who might know something of her brother and father.
For a month she returned home with no news and a heavy heart until one day at the station she asked a man who had returned from the camp if he knew anything of Bela and Laszlo.
‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘They are over there.’
She ran to them and fell into their arms.
Marta died in January 2021 when she was 95 years old and the last survivor Zsuzsa Diamanstein died last year having lived to 101.
The Trust had kept its promise and supported the incredible survivors of Targu Mures until the last.
Sandor Ausch, a survivor who until his death was leader of the Jewish community in Targu Mures, had once said: ‘The lives of Jewish people are full of miracles and for us the Trust was one of those miracles.’
- An Unbreakable Bond by Sharon Mail is available now on Amazon.
