One of the most intriguing survivors from the train was Gina Rappaport.
Fluent in a half-dozen languages, on the day of the train’s liberation she served as translator between the English-speaking U.S. soldiers and prisoners who had been brought to Bergen-Belsen from all over Europe. It is not too much to say that without Gina, total chaos might have prevailed on that day and more lives would have been needlessly lost. Gina is truly one of the heroes of this story.
Today we interviewed her son. And as you might imagine from such a mother, Eran Leitersdorf is a remarkable man in his own right: physician, scholar, and former Dean of Medicine at Hadassah Hebrew University.
Eran remembers that when he was a child, his mother would tell him bedtime stories about her life during the War, during the Holocaust. But instead of this being a horrifying experience, she made sure to tell only stories with happy endings. One of these that she told over and over was the story of how she was at last freed from the Nazis by the American soldiers who discovered the stalled train.
“The good guys won,” she told him, “because good always wins in the end.”
In a lifetime of caring for others and advancing humanitarian causes, Eran has found his mother’s teachings to be true. And he is spreading the word. “Good wins in the end,” he says. “It may take a while, but it does.”