Many retirees have no desire to stop working, and they keep going as long as they have the physical energy and the mental ability.
One such person is child Holocaust survivor Rena Quint, who generally works six days a week – sometimes seven. But she doesn’t consider the work she’s doing as a job. From her perspective, it’s a mission to make as many people as possible aware of the Holocaust and conscious of where that kind of tyranny can lead.
With International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, In Jerusalem is proud to profile Quint – arguably one of the best-known Holocaust survivors in English-speaking circles.
Many people who have heard her speak and have recorded her have uploaded her meetings with Jewish and non-Jewish groups on YouTube. In addition, her talks have been uploaded by synagogue groups in Israel and abroad by Yad Vashem and by the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, among others.
She has also been interviewed on television and radio and even more frequently by reporters representing numerous newspapers and magazines in various languages.
An articulate speaker who tries to tailor her conversations to her audience, Quint became even better known following the publication of a book, A Daughter of Many Mothers, which she wrote together with Barbara Sofer, who writes a regular column for The Magazine.
Before they began their joint effort, Quint often said in the course of her addresses that she wasn’t sure whether some episodes she mentioned were genuine and that she actually did experience them or whether she had read about them and they merged with her childhood memories.
Sofer is an excellent researcher, and she managed to trace documents in Europe to confirm the veracity of much of what Quint said she vaguely remembered.
Search for her past
Before 1981, Quint had done very little about tracking her past. It was barely mentioned in the home of her adoptive parents Leah and Jacob Globe as she was growing up. She couldn’t remember what her biological parents or her two brothers looked like, and for a little girl she had undergone so many frightening and traumatic experiences that the Globes thought it better not to ask.
But in 1981, there was a world conference of Holocaust survivors in Israel, and Quint decided to go and see if she could find any living relatives or survivors from her native city of Piotrkow in Poland who might have known her family.
There were screens set up in what is today known as the Jerusalem International Convention Center, and people were putting up notices in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and numerous European languages with their contact details and the names of people for whom they were searching.
Quint’s notice went unanswered. Disappointed to the depths of her soul, she was advised to write to the Arolsen Archives, International Center on Nazi Persecution, which is based in Germany.
Sure enough, there was a record of her father having been taken to Bergen-Belsen.
Quint’s children knew part of her story, and when a teacher at the Yeshiva of Flatbush asked the class if anyone had a Holocaust survivor in the family, Quint’s son, David, put up his hand and said that his mother was a survivor. The teacher didn’t believe him, as Quint was an American in almost every sense of the word. The teacher called Quint and said that David had an overactive imagination. When Quint asked what about, she was told that her little boy had said that his mother was a Holocaust survivor. “I am,” said Quint. The teacher was flabbergasted. Quint spoke English with a New York accent, she rode a bike, she played tennis, she was smartly dressed. She simply didn’t fit the stereotyped image of a Holocaust survivor. Neither do many others.
Supported by her husband, the late Rabbi Emanuel Quint, she began investigating her past; and the more she did so, the more she remembered – but still wasn’t absolutely sure.
Over the past 40 years, with her own investigation and the help of Jacek Bednarek, an expert non-Jewish Polish researcher, as well as Sofer, she has acquired a lot of information, including the fact that her parents had a prenuptial agreement at a time when it was not yet fashionable.
She also has a photo of her father which Bednarek came across while scanning other records. It’s the only photo she has of her immediate biological Polish family. Photos that her father gave her as a child were torn out of her hand by a Nazi, who promptly destroyed them. But thanks to Bednarek and the Arolsen Archives, she has also acquired copies of several documents that lend weight to her story.
Holocaust educator
Quint has now lost track of how many groups she has spoken to, but is always ready for more.
Due to her age, she cannot get around without a walker, which has limited her only in the sense that she needs someone to drive her to a venue. The other limitation is that whereas she used to accompany Israeli youth traveling to Poland, she can no longer do so.
But on one such trip several years ago, there was a boy who didn’t really fit in until they got to the Treblinka death camp, where the ground is full of different sized stones symbolizing Jewish communities across Poland that were either decimated or totally annihilated by the Nazis. The sizes of the stones are in relation to the size of each community. For want of a better expression, it’s a virtual cemetery.
Quint had told the youngsters her story and asked if anyone could find the stone for Piotrkow. It was found by the boy who didn’t fit in. All of a sudden he did, and he went running to her, shouting excitedly: “I found it. I found your stone!”
In recent years, Quint’s audiences have grown. For one thing, there was the corona pandemic, which considerably reduced in-person meetings, but she had requests from synagogues and Jewish organizations abroad – mostly the United States – to speak on Zoom, which she did. Well before the pandemic, she had speaking engagements in Poland, Germany, the US, and South Africa. She had invitations from other countries as well, but commitments in Israel precluded her from accepting them.
She is also a frequent hostess for groups such as Shabbat of a Lifetime, Momentum, Birthright, and Masad.
She asks the participants in each group for anyone who has never met a Holocaust survivor before to raise their hand.
Given the fact that there are Holocaust survivors in most Jewish communities – including those from North Africa – it is amazing how many people had never encountered a Holocaust survivor before they met Quint.
She is gratified by the number of high school and university students who, after having heard her story in a group session, ask if they could come back on their own to talk to her. Some come back more than once. She always welcomes them, happy that the next generation wants to make sure that the world doesn’t forget.
Relating to diverse audiences
Sometimes she’s stumped before speaking to a particular audience; but once she gets started, everything works itself out.
A case in point was a school for special-needs boys who were mentally challenged. She wondered what on earth she could say to them that they would understand. So she started with a series of questions. “Who’s ever met anyone with six mothers?” “Who has ever met someone who was both a boy and a girl?”
Of course, they hadn’t, and were curious. So she explained how her mother had pushed her out of the synagogue in Piotrkow; how she had worked with her father in the ghetto and in the labor camp in Czestochowa, where he had disguised her as a boy; and how in Bergen-Belsen, for fear that it would be discovered that she was a girl, he had asked someone in the women’s camp to take care of her. She never saw her father again. The woman who briefly took care of her in the camp also disappeared, and then so did another.
The last woman to take care of her in the camp received papers from America after the war for herself, her son, and her daughter. But her daughter died, and the woman offered the girl’s papers to Quint, who was then barely 11 years old and all alone in the world. But soon after they got to America, the woman died, and her relatives did not relish the idea of raising a little girl who was a stranger to them.
They knew of a childless couple, the Globes, who sorely wanted a child. Quint, whose original surname was Lichtensztajn and had gone to America as Fannie Philipstahl, became Rena Globe because her Yiddish name translated as Rena, which means “joy.”
Although the Globes were exceedingly good to her, she was suspicious of them, fearing from past experience that they, too, would disappear. To reassure her, Jacob Globe asked if she knew what a contract was. Of course, she didn’t, so he explained it to her and asked her if she wanted to write a contract with them to guarantee that they would stay with her forever. The contract was duly signed.
Sometime later, not able to get her own way over something she wanted, she said that if she couldn’t have it, she was leaving. “You can’t,” said Jacob. “You signed a contract.”
One of the most traumatic days in Quint’s adult life was when Jacob Globe died. She expected to have her dress cut as is customary for a first-degree mourner, but the rabbi told her it wasn’t necessary because she was adopted. It was like a slap in the face. The Globes had done everything possible to make her feel as though she were their own flesh and blood, and here was a rabbi opening old wounds.
But Leah Globe, who died in Jerusalem when she was 100, continued to keep the contract and was a true and loving grandmother to Quint’s children.
Living well is the best revenge
For a little girl orphaned by the Nazis, Quint has done well in terms of revenge. She gave birth to four children, is a grandmother of 22, and great-grandmother of 47, with four more on the way.
Most Holocaust survivors with large families say that this is their revenge on Hitler. He wanted to exterminate the Jews, but today the total number of Jews in the world exceeds the number on the eve of the Second World War.
Since October 7, Quint is often asked to compare the massacre by Hamas with what the Nazis were doing in the Second World War. While she can identify with the suffering experienced by the hostages taken by Hamas, to her and every other Holocaust survivor the difference is obvious. Although Jews fought in allied armies during the Holocaust, there was no Jewish army – no Israeli army. Today there is, and the Israel Defense Forces can retaliate. Twelve members of Quint’s family are fighting in Gaza. She is naturally concerned, but she’s also very proud.
Recently, a contest was held at Yad Vashem in which participants were asked out of all the survivors whose stories they’ve heard, to name the person they regard as their hero. Quint apparently scored the most votes, When she was asked to name her hero, she immediately said Janusz Korczak, the Polish Jewish pediatrician, educator, and author whose real name was Henryk Goldszmit. Korczak was so well known and admired, that the Nazis were prepared to let him go. But he ran the Jewish orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto and refused to abandon the children, who loved him. He went with them to Treblinka, where he and they were murdered.
Some of the children went to Auschwitz. One of them, Shmuel Gogol, to whom Korczak had given a harmonica, played it in the Auschwitz orchestra. It saved his life. After the war, he founded a harmonica orchestra in Israel. In 1993, when then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin went to Poland for the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, he took Gogol with him. In the course of that visit they went to Auschwitz, where Gogol played “Hatikva” on his harmonica. When he played in the Auschwitz orchestra, he said, he kept his eyes closed. This time, he was playing with his eyes open.
Rabin turned to his wife, Leah, and said to her: “Sing loud, Leah. In this place, you have to sing ‘Hatikva’ louder than ever.” ■