His parents were married shortly before Hitler’s army invaded Poland. “They didn’t have much of a honeymoon.”
The next year, they were forced into a ghetto, where his mother discovered she was pregnant. People around her asked her how could she do such a thing? How could she bring a child into the world at this time? But we are glad she did — the child was Yitzhak Glecer.
A man of deep and quiet faith, he has preferred to remain quiet through the years about his experiences. But today he sought guidance from the Torah, and felt it had led him to share his memories and feelings about his time in the Shoah.
We were all touched by his faith in us, and his devotion to the beliefs that sustained his family through those darkest of times.
Yitzhak has a beautiful family of whom he is justly proud. They gathered with us, eager to sit in respectful silence to hear him speak about these things he has always kept to himself.
His memories of Bergen-Belsen and the train are mostly vague impressions because he was only two years old in 1945. But like many other of the survivors who were children at the time, he grew up with his parents living forever in the shadow of the horrors they had endured, kept alive in the stories they had to tell.
Yitzhak shared a “somewhat happy” memory. He recalls that when he and his parents were sent to Bergen-Belsen, his father managed to hang onto multiple packs of cigarettes, knowing they might later be used these to barter for bread. He was right — and it almost certainly kept the family alive when food in the camp became scarce. Yitzhak’s father used to look back on that and say, “A better deal I never made.”
He jokes today that Miriam Muller was his first girlfriend. They met as young children in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, where Yitzhak remembers they played together to the extent that they could get away with it.
Yitzhak’s naturally desire to play like other children almost caused a serious situation when he innocently tried to make friends with one of the camp’s guard dogs. You can imagine how quickly Yitzhak’s father got his son away from the dog once he saw what was happening.
Yitzhak’s life story includes a unique combination: he was very young when he was liberated and he fathered children late in life. The result is that his youngest son, seen here on the left, is very likely the youngest second-generation survivor of the train incident.
He will be keeping his father’s story and memory alive for a long, long time to come.