‘A Thousand Kisses’ As Yad Vashem Spotlights Hopes Of Doomed Holocaust Victims
Image by Yad Vashem
“Hope to see you in good health, a thousand kisses, mommy,” were the last words Betty’s mother wrote to her before being sent with her eight-week-old baby to their deaths at the Sobibor Nazi concentration camp in eastern Poland in 1943.
Sitting at her home with a pastoral view from a hilltop town overlooking the Mediteranean sea, 76-year-old Betty Kazin Rosenbaum read the hand-written letter in Dutch from the mother she never really got to know.
Betty keeps her mother’s original letter in her home, but she provided a scanned copy for a new digital exhibition unveiled at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust research center and museum in Jerusalem.
After spending several years in a ghetto in Amsterdam, the family separated. In 1943, two-year-old Betty was sent to a Christian foster home in the town of Eibergen in The Netherlands until the end of the war.
Her mother and eight-week-old baby brother were hidden by a Christian family in Neede, but were betrayed by locals.
“She always wrote with a lot of hope and never depressive,” said Betty with a smile. “Here she writes mommy. It is her and then I feel very close with her.”
Yad Vashem recently launched its third digital exhibition of letters obtained from the Holocaust, entitled “Last Letters From The Holocaust: 1943.” The exhibit “I Left Everyone At Home” includes ten handwritten letters in different languages.—Reuters
