Musings: Hitler's eventual demise is what kept her going
Holocaust survivor Helen Diamant with husband Howard at the wedding of their daughter, Laura, in 1970. Credit: Siegelman-Diamant Family Photo
When my mother-in-law, Helen Diamant, was a 22-year-old woman named Chella Wildenberg in Poland in 1939, Adolf Hitler’s army invaded her country at the beginning of World War II.
After suffering in a labor camp for several years, she learned that all the workers there would soon be sent to the infamous Treblinka concentration camp to be murdered in its gas chambers.
Somehow, she managed to escape and then rescued her younger brother from another work camp.
After weeks of running, hiding, freezing and starving, he told her he wanted them to give themselves up — knowing they would be shot to death but also that their fear, hunger and suffering would end. He believed that their continuing survival was an impossibility.
But Helen said, “No, I won’t do that. I have to see the end of Hitler.” She later said that this belief was part of what “kept me going.”
Unfortunately, she and her brother eventually got separated, and before the end of the war he, their older brother and sister, their parents, and two dozen other relatives were killed. Except Helen, who kept her promise to see Hitler’s demise.
When Hitler killed himself in 1945, Helen was working as maid, having found relative safety in — of all places — Germany. She was 28 years old and went on to live until the age of 99, outliving Hitler by 71 long and fruitful years.
When “Miss Helen” died inside her Jesup, Georgia, home in 2016, she died with dignity, surrounded by people who loved her.
Her cemetery headstone rightly identifies Helen Diamant as a Holocaust survivor, but she was also a striver and a thriver who made her way to the United States, raised a family and lived a productive life.
As we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday, we should honor all those who survived, like Helen, and all of those who did not. May their memories live forever.
— Richard Siegelman, Plainview
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