Posted on 04/23/25
“You Are Free”: A Conversation with Rena Quint on the Eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day
Jerusalem, Israel - April 23, 2025 - On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, a small, attentive group sat around the dining room table in the Jerusalem home of Rena Quint, a Holocaust survivor whose life story traverses unimaginable loss and remarkable resilience. Born in 1935 in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, Rena's earliest memories are punctuated by fear, separation, and survival.
In 1939, the Germans—"educated, sophisticated" as she serenely relates—took her father away. Her brother was dragged to a cellar to hide for a short time. One man tore her from her mother’s grasp and carried her to safety. Her father hid her in a factory with him. Warning her, “You’re not a 6-year-old girl anymore,” he told her. “You’re a 10-year-old boy now.” That identity helped her survive, working in a glass factory under brutal conditions, where she saw dogs attack inmates and people being shot without reason.
Six concentration camps, all in Poland. “Why Poland?” she asked. “Because the Jews were there.” She passed through the horrors of Buchenwald, where she witnessed a schoolteacher collapse in the snow without shoes. People were shot on the spot. She remembers the showers, freezing, meager rations, and a single blanket for six people.
At the time of her liberation on April 15, 1945, she had seen 15,000 bodies cast into open pits. “Dead and half-dead,” she said, remembering how British soldiers arrived, telling the survivors they were free. But some died even after liberation—fed too quickly after long starvation. "You are free now," the British soldiers said, but she was sick with typhus and malnutrition. Thousands died after liberation by eating too much too quickly, their bodies not used to food.
One memory stands out with chilling clarity: being thrown out of her family’s apartment in 1941. Years later, in 1989, with the support of her husband, she returned. The building was there, and the space where a mezuzah once hung was still visible. “No one left,” she recalled of her town. “Even the library was empty.”
In Sweden, Rena was placed in an “alien camp” with other women and children. A Swedish family gave her a doll and a wooden toy, which she still has on display in her living room. After 1948, she eventually made her way to the United States. She remembered learning English word by word, puzzled by American customs. “You are supposed to cry when someone dies,” she said. “But I didn’t know what was normal.”
Rena later married and built a life of love and gratitude, celebrating 60 years of marriage with Rabbi Emmanuel Quint z"l. In 1981, she attended the International Conference on the Holocaust, searching for surviving relatives, but there were none.
Her life story, told in her memoir, written with the help of Barbara Sofer, A Daughter of Many Mothers: Her Horrific Childhood and Wonderful Life, is both harrowing and hopeful, and suitable for young readers. “Every day,” she said, “I give thanks.”
The Jerusalem Press Club facilitated and coordinated the evening with Zikaron BaSalon. A group of young people felt that the new generation needed to connect with Yom HaShoah in a more personal and meaningful way than the large official Israeli ceremonies. The first meeting of Zikaron BaSalon was in the founder's private living room. Over the years, it has grown.. President Reuven Rivlin invited his neighbors in Beit Hanasi to meet a Holocaust survivor and hear their story. Millions of hosts, participants, and speakers, all over the world, have heard first or second-generation stories of survivors in small personal settings.
Rena Quint was one of the "lucky" children. Over a million Jewish children were murdered by the Nazis. The difference between now and the 1930s and 1940s, she said, is that we have a country and a place to go. Her large extended family lives in Israel, and though still a US citizen, she would not go back to live in the US.
Rena was one of the two women in the famous photo when President Joe Biden visited Yad Vashem.
Photos line the walls in her home. The one possession she clutched in her hand after being separated from her birth family was a photo of her with her father. A Nazi guard wondered what valuable was in her hand. He grabbed the photo and threw it away.
She asked, "If you had 10 minutes to leave your house, what would you take?"
She has no photo of her mother or recollection of how she looked. Today, photos line the walls of her home.
Rena means "joy," a translation from Fraidel, one of her many childhood names. It is always a joy to see Rena and hear her story, which she repeats to groups in her home and at Yad Vashem. She even travelled to South Africa to tell her story of resilience to prisoners in jail.
As the world pauses to remember the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, Rena’s voice is a living reminder of both the depths of cruelty and the heights of human resilience. Her words—soft but unwavering—echo one truth above all: “We are still here.”
