Hana Greenfield

Hana Greenfield (born Hana Lustigová on November 3, 1926 in Kolín , Czechoslovakia ; died on January 27, 2014 in Tel Aviv , Israel ) was an Israeli writer, publisher, and survivor of the Holocaust .

Hana Lustigová grew up with her older sister Irena in a very patriotic Czech family in Kolín , which, despite the German occupation and increasing repression against Jews, did not consider fleeing abroad. On June 10, 1942, the entire family and 750 other Jews from the city were transported to Bohušovice nad Ohří , a few kilometers from the Theresienstadt concentration camp , on the AAd transport. There - apparently an act of revenge for the killing of Reinhard Heydrich in Operation Anthropoid , like the Lidice massacre - a transport of 1,000 Jews was put together and transferred to another train. Since 1,050 Jews were accidentally put on the train, 50 prisoners, including Hana and her family, had to get out and walk the three kilometers to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The 1,000 Jews on the train were murdered.

Hana's personal situation was improved by assigned work in a kitchen, but she lost her grandfather to suicide and a close friend to complications from medical intervention. Her mother Maria was sent to care for children from Białystok with 52 other prisoners in August 1943 . Due to a contact block between the children and their carers and the other inmates of Theresienstadt, which was supposed to prevent information about the conditions in the Bialystok ghetto from being passed on, Hana saw her mother only once. On October 5, 1943, the special transport Dn / a left Theresienstadt with 1,196 children and 53 doctors and carers, allegedly with Switzerland as its destination. Only several years after the end of the war was Hana able to find her mother's name on a list of names on the special transport; the children and their adult companions were transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and murdered in the gas chambers on the evening before Yom Kippur , October 7, 1943 .

The next stop while Hana's detention was the Auschwitz concentration camp , where she in 1943 with 500 other prisoners as "fit for work" for forced labor in Hamburg was turned off. Most recently she was forced to go on a death march to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp , from which she was liberated on April 15, 1945. She was then brought to England by an uncle who worked as a chemist in Cambridge and who had found her name on a list of survivors from Bergen-Belsen. In 1952 she emigrated to Israel .

In 1954, Hanna Lustigová met her future husband Murray Greenfield in Israel . Greenfield was a New York businessman and former employee of the Palestine Economic Cooperation and a supporter of the Alija Bet . In the years that followed, both were entrepreneurs in a variety of ways. So they founded several art galleries in New York City and Israel and a duty-free company. In 1981 they were both the founders of the Gefen Publishing House in Jerusalem.

Hana Greenfield's autobiography Fragments of Memory was published in two English editions and in Iwrit, Czech, Russian and German. This book was awarded by the Axel Springer Foundation . Their reports have been published in numerous languages, Ivrit , Polish , French , Yiddish , English , German and Czech . Her research on the “Children of Białystok ” was first published in 1988 at the Oxford University “Remembering for the Future” conference under the titles Murder on Yom Kippur , Documents and Exchange and Robbery .

Greenfield was a board member of the Ghetto Museum in Theresienstadt. Since 1994, thousands of children have taken part every year in the program that she developed to convey tolerance and knowledge about Jewish history and the Holocaust to Czech children. She was honored by the Czech President Vaclav Havel for these long-term efforts in the field of education . In addition, she set up the Hana Greenfield Fund, a non-profit foundation.

Hana Greenfield lived in Ramat Aviv with her husband Murray and their three children . She died on January 27, 2014 after a long illness. Her son Dror died in 2003, leaving behind her husband Murray, two children and her sister Irene Revel, who lived in Prague.

Publications (selection)

• Hana Greenfield: Fragments of Memory. From Kolin to Jerusalem. Revised edition . Gefen Publishing House , Jerusalem 2006, ISBN 965-229-379-2 , PDF, 9.8 MBhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fbterezin.org.il%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F10%2FFragments41-266dpiGray-10.5.06.pdf~GB%3D~IA%3D~ MDZ% ​​3D% 0A ~ SZ% 3D ~ double-sided% 3D ~ LT% 3DPDF% 2C% 209% 2C8% 20MB ~ PUR% 3D (also published in Iwrit, Czech and Russian);
  • Hana Greenfield: From Kolin to Jerusalem - memories . Konkret Literatur Verlag, 1999, ISBN 978-3-89458-176-3 ;
• Hana Greenfield: Survivors Speak Out . Gefen Publishing House, Jerusalem 1989, ISBN 965-229-041-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} The Story of Hana Lustig - Greenfield , website of Památník Terezín (Theresienstadt Memorial), Newsletter 1/2013, accessed on October 24, 2018.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Marion Fischel: Publisher Hana Greenfield dies at 87 , Jerusalem Post, January 28, 2014, accessed October 24, 2018.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Mordechai I. Twersky: Hana Greenfield, 1926-2014. Holocaust Survivor Who Safeguarded Lessons and Legacy , Haaretz, January 29, 2014, accessed October 24, 2018.
4. ↑ Livia Bitton-Jackson: Hanna Greenfield: The Heroine Of Holocaust History , JewishPress.com, February 28, 2014, accessed October 24, 2018.

Web links

• Bialystok Children's Transport List from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, DN / a October 5th, 1943 , website with information about the children's transport from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, in which Hana Lustigová's mother was;