Continuing on with my series investigating the stories of so-called ‘Holocaust Survivors’. We have the case of one Regina Findling.
She ‘was just 18 months old, the youngest of five children, when the Nazis came pounding on their third-floor apartment door in Cologne, Germany, during Kristallnacht. The oldest brother, Josef, age 10, smothered her with a garment until she turned blue in order to stifle the crying that would surely put all their lives at risk.
Two weeks prior, their father was deported back to Poland, along with 16,000 Polish-born Jewish males living in Germany. Before he left, and with great foresight, he built a barricade for the door of their meager flat that, at that critical and perilous moment, prevented the Nazis from capturing his wife and five young children. This was the first of many miracles that spared the lives of the five Findling kids, who later became part of the mere 7 percent of Jewish children who survived the Holocaust. Being so young, Regina in particular paid a heavy price for her survival that would damage her for life.
Six weeks after Kristallnacht, in an act of unimaginable love and courage, their mother, my grandmother, put her four older children ages 6 to 10 on a train to Belgium, deceiving and convincing the authorities they would just be visiting relatives for Christmas and returning in the evening. In Belgium, the four ended up in orphanages and foster homes for Jewish refugee children. Regina’s three brothers later escaped to southern France when the Nazis invaded Brussels in May 1940, and eventually were rescued and brought to the U.S. in September 1941. Regina and her mother were smuggled into Belgium and Regina’s sister Fanny joined them. When it became too dangerous after the Nazi occupation, Fanny and Regina, now 3, were placed by their mother in hiding in separate Catholic convents in Belgium until the end of the war. Regina and Fanny were reunited with each other and their three brothers in 1948 in Detroit, where Regina, 11, was placed in a foster home separate from her siblings. They would not learn until years later that both their parents were murdered by the Nazis.’ (1)
Now the obvious point here is that Findling didn’t actually ‘survive’ the so-called ‘Holocaust’, because she left Germany in either December 1938 or January 1939 on a kindertransport. She was then kept in Belgian convent during the Second World War and never went anywhere near a concentration camp.
Indeed her siblings all survived because they were either gotten out of Europe or were simply placed in gentile institutions to be looked after.
Therefore we can reasonably say that Findling isn’t a ‘Holocaust Survivor’, because while she was in Europe at the time. Her mother placed her in a convent well before the ‘Holocaust’ was dreamt up and as such she was merely present rather than a survivor per se.
References
(1) https://www.jweekly.com/2018/07/23/aunt-traumatized-by-holocaust-disappears-for-40-years/