![\"screenshot](\"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/feb-27-Holocaust.27.VHEC-Heritage-talk_Herman-and-Rebecca-Teitelbaum-1938.jpg\")
<\/a>Rebecca and her husband Herman were married in 1938. \u201cThey had a daughter, Anny, in 1939, and they lived \u2026 near Brussels, before the Second World War. Rebecca worked in the accounting department of a department store in the city of Brussels.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kirchner also shared a photo of Isaac and Dworja Buckman, who married around the same time as the Teitelbaums.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe same year that Rebecca\u2019s daughter, Anny, was born, Isaac and Dworja had a son, Alex, in October 1939.\u201d<\/p>\n
In May 1940, Germany invaded Belgium and the Nazis set up a military occupation government. \u201cUnlike many other countries where the civil administrations cooperated with Nazi deportations, the situation in Belgium was much different and, as a result, the survival rate of Belgian Jews was higher than many of the Western European countries,\u201d said Kirchner.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, restrictions were placed on Jews and Kirchner went through the progression of anti-Jewish laws in Belgium. There were pogroms, as well, and, in May 1942, all Jews over the age of 6 had\u00a0 <\/span>to wear the yellow star to identify them as Jewish.<\/p>\n From 1941 to mid-1942, Anny and Alex were placed into hiding, which worked until their families ran out of money, said Kirchner. When the woman hiding the kids denounced them to the Nazi authorities, the families were in grave danger.<\/p>\n \u201cBetween 1942 and 1944, the German occupying forces deported around 25,000 Jews from Belgium to concentration and death camps in the east, primarily to Auschwitz, and only 2,000 of these survived \u2013 43% of the Jewish population in Belgium was murdered,\u201d said Kirchner.<\/p>\n Once the Belgian resistance became more organized, there were resistance networks focused on hiding Jewish children. The largest was the Committee for the Defence of Jews, she said, and it successfully hid some 2,400 Jewish children from the Nazis, including Anny and Alex.<\/p>\n Isaac and Dworja Buckman were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943 and murdered. Rebecca and Herman Teitelbaum were deported to forced labour camps in Germany: Herman\u00a0 <\/span>to Buchenwald, and Rebecca to Ravensbr\u00fcck.<\/p>\n \u201cRebecca spent 17 months in Ravensbr\u00fcck concentration camp as a slave labourer,\u201d said Kirchner. \u201cShe was first assigned to work hard labour, hauling wood and stone and heavy carts in very harsh outdoor conditions, but, because she had worked in that department store in Belgium and she had experience with accounting work, she was able to secure a much better work assignment in the office of the Siemens factory.\u201d<\/p>\n Siemens was one of the private companies that used Jewish slave labour, explained Kirchner, before turning the floor over to Lawson to talk about Ravensbr\u00fcck.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was originally built for a little over a thousand prisoners, but, at its peak in 1945, there were over 50,000 prisoners,\u201d said Lawson, who went into some detail about the factory and Siemens\u2019 cooperation with the Nazis.<\/p>\n Despite the unimaginable circumstances, resistance was evident. Lawson shared a quote from Lidia Beccia Rolfi, an Italian prisoner: \u201cEven the theft of a piece of wire, a sheet of paper, of a cloth rag was seen as sabotage, but everyone committed that. Any form of friendship between inmates was seen as sabotage.\u201d<\/p>\n Lawson played a clip from Alex Buckman\u2019s video-recorded survivor testimony. He explained how Rebecca noticed there weren\u2019t that many supervisors at night.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then she stole a piece of brown paper, and she put it in her dress,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then she stole a little pencil and a pair of scissors. And, at night, she ran towards her barrack, very nervous because she knew that, if somebody would stop her with all these stolen goods, she would be in trouble and they probably would make an example of her, maybe either shoot her or hang her. But she did it.\u201d<\/p>\n In the barrack, she cut the paper into smaller pieces and started to write recipes \u201cof meals that she did for her husband and her daughter before the war\u2026. With the help of other women, who gave her some of their own recipes, and many of hers, she wrote 110 recipes,\u201d he said. \u201cEven though food was very important to stay alive in the concentration camp, she actually traded some of her food for needles and thread, and she made a book so she could keep it.\u201d<\/p>\n The recipes weren\u2019t necessarily accurate, said Kirchner. \u201cYou\u2019ll notice most of the recipes are very heavy on butter and sugar and luxury items like raisins and rum or cream. On the other hand, some of the recipes reflect wartime scarcity\u2026. But the dominant theme of these recipes is one of abundance.\u201d<\/p>\n The recipes reflect the cultural diversity of the women imprisoned in the camp, said Kirchner. \u201cThese were women from all over Europe \u2026 about half of them were Jewish, but many of them were not, and so the recipes reflect a cultural diversity that\u2019s Jewish, Belgian, French, Spanish, Mediterranean.\u201d<\/p>\n Teitelbaum completed three recipe books, giving two to other women in the camp.<\/p>\n \u201cRebecca also created another thin volume that contains poems and resistance songs,\u201d said Kirchner, adding, \u201cShe also made two sets of playing cards, which the Roma women in the camp would use to tell the fortune of other prisoners. So, again, building community between not just the Jewish women in the camp, but across cultures. And this was an essential form of hope and community-building and resistance by the camp inmates.\u201d<\/p>\n Teitelbaum was one of 2,000 women saved in a Red Cross mission that saw 36 buses take the women from Ravensbr\u00fcck to safety in Denmark and Sweden. However, the area was still a war zone and one fleet was hit by friendly fire.<\/p>\n \u201cThis convoy carrying 706 women, including Rebecca, was attacked multiple times by fighter planes and, as a result, there were about 25 fatalities and numerous injuries among the rescued prisoners,\u201d said Kirchner. \u201cRebecca herself survived the attack, but was hit by shrapnel and badly injured her left arm. And, in the scuffle and the mayhem that followed \u2026 she lost her bundle of belongings: a sack that contained her recipe book.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>