Miriam was a tiny child when her family was forced into the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. But even though she was only four years old in 1945, her memories of that terrible time linger.
The closest thing she has to a happy memory is of playing in the mud with another child. He was Yitzhak Glecer, also liberated from the train — and on this day in 2023, our host for the day. It was lovely to experience this day with both Miriam and Yitzhak, still friends after all these years.
She told everything she remembers and everything that was later explained to her by her parents. So we learned how they came to be imprisoned, what life was like for them at Bergen-Belsen, all about being locked up in the train for seven days, and of course all about the glorious moment of liberation.
Both are so deeply grateful to Matt Rozell for his passionate work in keep their stories alive.
“You are truly a messenger of God,” Miriam told Matt. “You are His messenger.”
You’ve heard about forged passports created by ingenious anti-Nazi craftsmen, like the ones Donald Pleasance makes in the film The Great Escape? Thanks to Miriam I’ve now held one on my hands! Note that it declares their family to be citizens of the Republic of Chile. They were in fact from Poland.
And it contains an unexpected bonus: her father’s fake passport was signed by the U.S. soldier Abraham “Al” Cohen, who we have heard of from many people who were on the train. They vivdly and fondly remember him running down the hill to them, showing his Star-of-David chain and calling out, in Yiddish, “ikh bin a id!” (I am a Jew!)
Miriam says that when her father heard this, he approached Cohen and asked him his name — and in response, Cohen wrote his name (in English and in Hebrew) in Miriam’s father’s passport — the only convenient thing they had to write on. And here it is. Cohen has been an almost mythical figure for us … this is the most tangible connection we’ve had to him yet.
Everyone who was nursed back to health at Hillersleben was ultimately released with a document, a certificate from the institution’s “Camp Council.” It was a very good idea of someone’s; it created a written record, in English and in French, of the names, birthdates, origins, and planned destinations of each of the thousands of people who came through there. Miriam — that is, Mirjam Matzner — was certified to leave the Army’s care on May 10, 1945.
You can see that it also records that her family was held prisoner at Bergen-Belsen from July 7, 1943 to April 7, 1945 — a year and nine months — then liberated on April 13, 1945.
Note that this record makes no mention of where she was between April 7th and April 13th. If we didn’t know she was on the train during all that time, this would be quite a mystery…
Another amazing artifact Miriam has kept from those days — one of the thousands of leaflets showered down on Bergen-Belsen by Allied planes. It says, in short, that the war is basically over and the Nazis are on the run.
Miriam explains the significance that leafleting has for her: “This was to give us the strength to live.”