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During the final months of World War II, Lola Kantorowicz went to great lengths to hide the fact that she was pregnant. She succeeded, as most inmates in the prison Bergen-Belsen People in the concentration camps had bloated bellies from chronic starvation.
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Ilana Kantorowicz Shalem, 81, is one of the youngest Holocaust survivors. She survived because she was born at the end of the war and the Nazi leadership was in disarray. Otherwise, she would definitely be killed.
More than eight years after the Holocaust ended, Shalem shared her story for the first time — and that of her mother — realizing how few Holocaust survivors were left.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is celebrated around the world on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious death camp that housed some 1.1 million people, the majority of whom were Jewishkilled. The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution in 2005 designating the day as an annual observance.
Some 6 million European Jews and millions of others, including Poles, Roma, disabled people and LGBTQ+ people, were murdered by the Nazis and their associates. About 1.5 million are children.
This year’s commemorations come amid a rise in anti-Semitism, which has gained traction during the two-decade-long war between Israel and Israel. Hamas In Gaza.
love in dark places
Shalem’s parents met as teenagers in the Tomazow Ghetto in Poland. Lola Rosenblum was from the town, and Hersz (Zvi) Abraham Kantorowicz moved to the ghetto from Lodz, Poland.
After spending several years in harsh labor conditions in the ghetto, including losing family members, they were transferred to several labor camps, where they were able to continue meeting in secret for several months.
“My mother said there was actually a lot of love in those places,” Shalem said, recalling the camps. “They used to walk along the river. It was very romantic.”
Her mother’s friend had helped arrange a secret meeting between the two, who had an informal wedding in a ghetto.
In 1944, the couple separated. Herz Kantolovitch was eventually killed on a death march just days before the end of the war. Lola spent time in Auschwitz and Hindenburg labor camps. She completed a death march to Bergen-Belsen, Germany, while pregnant.
“If they found out she was pregnant, they would kill her,” Shalem said. “She hid the pregnancy from everyone, including her friends, because she didn’t want the extra attention or anyone giving her food.”
Yad Vashem Sima Vilkovich, an archivist who researched Shalem’s story, called it “unthinkable” for a baby to be born in such conditions.
“Things were really bad in March, with bodies piling up,” Vilkovich said. “There were thousands, hundreds of thousands of people sick and almost no food.”
To this day, Shalem cannot explain how her mother survived the conditions in the refugee camp and gave birth to a healthy baby. Mother and daughter spent a month in the Bergen-Belsen refugee camp before it was liberated by the British, and then spent another two years in a nearby displaced persons camp.
They then moved to Israel, where her father’s parents had moved before the war. Shalem’s mother had hoped for years that her father would survive. She never married again and had no additional children.
our children
In the months after the war ended, baby Ilana was cared for as one of the only children in the refugee camp.
“I’m actually everybody’s kid because to them it’s some sign of life,” Shalem said. “There were many, many women there who took care of me because they were so excited to be with a little baby.”
Photos from the time show a smiling baby Ilana, surrounded by a group of adults. Shalem said her mother’s friends called her “a new seed” and a glimmer of hope in dark times.
She was unaware of any other children born in Bergen-Belsen who survived. Israel’s Holocaust Museum and Research Center Yad Vashem documents more than 2,000 babies born after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen refugee camp between 1945 and 1950. The Bergen-Belsen Museum found documents of Ilana’s birth, including the time of her birth, which are now kept at Yad Vashem.
A topic that few people talk about
Shalem, who studied social work, began asking her mother questions when she was in college in the 1960s, when delving into survivors’ experiences was still taboo in Israeli society.
“Now we know that in order to absorb trauma, we need to talk about it,” Shalem said. “These people don’t want to talk about it.”
She noted that immediately after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, many survivors of the attack began to speak out about what happened to them.
But the aftermath of the Holocaust, especially in Israel, was different. Many survivors try to forget what happened. Ilana’s mother often faced disbelief when sharing her story of giving birth in a concentration camp, so she largely stopped telling it. Shalem said her mother sometimes talked about what she went through with other survivor friends, but rarely with strangers.
Fewer than 200,000 Holocaust survivors remain
Shalem has never publicly shared the story of her mother, who died in 1991 at age 71. Last year, she completed a genealogy class at Yad Vashem and began to understand how few Holocaust survivors were able to share their stories.
There are approximately 196,600 Holocaust survivors alive, half of whom live in Israel, according to the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also known as the Claims Conference. Last year, nearly 25,000 Holocaust survivors died. The average age of Holocaust survivors is 87, meaning most were very young children during the Holocaust. Shalem is one of the youngest.
Shalem, who has two daughters, remembers sharing her pregnancy with her mother and being surprised by what she experienced.
“This situation is highly unusual and may require special strength to believe,” Shalem said.
“One of the things she said was that if she had known my father had been killed, she wouldn’t have tried so hard. She wanted him to know me.”