Rachel Neiger

Rachel Neiger, née Tuszynska, had graduated from high school before the war and wanted to study bacteriology at the University of Warsaw. However, due to anti-Jewish quotas that limited the number of Jewish students admitted, she was not accepted. She began training as a nurse in Łódź.

After the establishment of the Litzmannstadt (Łódź) ghetto, she, like the entire Jewish population of the city, was forced to move there. She worked in one of the ghetto’s hospitals, where she cared for Jewish children. On the orders of Chaim Rumkowski, the so-called “Jewish Elder” of the ghetto appointed by the Germans, she was part of a group of employees tasked with gathering Jewish children at the ghetto hospital. All of these children were murdered on German orders.1

“There was a children’s hospital, and they decided to bring all the children to one place. Rumkowski ordered all the nurses to gather the children. He gave us addresses to go to in order to pick up the children, and he said that all the children we picked up would be taken to the children’s hospital and saved. When we knocked on the doors, the mothers didn’t want to open them. We told them we had orders from Rumkowski and that these children would be saved. So we told the mothers to bring the children to a specific place in the morning, and they did. […] Later, one day, they came to the hospital and evacuated all the children who had been brought there. They took them away, and they were never seen again.”2

Her first husband at the time, Leon Rosen (born December 30, 1909, in Łódź), fought in the Polish Army. He had graduated from the Jaroczerski Gymnasium in Łódź, earned a degree from the Free University (Wolna Wszechnica) in Łódź, and owned a clothing store in Brzeziny.3 She says little about him in a postwar interview. In 1942, he was deported to the “Waldfrieden” labor camp near Łódź, where he was presumably shot.

As the Litzmannstadt ghetto began to be dismantled in May 1944, Rachel Neiger was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At that time, she did not yet know that the SS was systematically murdering the majority of the deportees in the gas chambers there. After only a few days, she was transferred to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig. Every day in Stutthof, she shared the meager meals with her sister-in-law.
“Then, because I had helped clean the toilets, I received an extra bowl of soup. I gave this bowl to my sister-in-law […]. I told her to come every day and get this extra bowl of soup, since I had enough, but one day she didn’t come anymore. When I found her, she was already dead.”4

During the evacuation of the Stutthof concentration camp, Rachel Neiger was forced to join a death march to Germany. She survived the several-day crossing of the Baltic Sea and the death march from Stutthof, and witnessed the end of the war in Neustadt in Holstein. There, she was liberated by British troops on May 3 and volunteered to help care for the survivors. But walking was difficult for her. An examination revealed that a lack of fluid between her bones, presumably due to dehydration, was causing severe pain. She likely had hunger edema. Through the mediation of Norbert Wollheim, vice-chairman of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone at the Bergen-Belsen DP camp, she began working for the Jewish relief organization American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and was sent to Lübeck shortly thereafter. She focused specifically on caring for children and worked at a hospital run by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).

“I received many chocolate bars from UNRRA and gave them to the children who came to the hospital for checkups. The mothers didn’t want to bring their children, but when the children knew they would get a piece of chocolate, they forced their mothers to take them to the regular checkups.”6

Starting in 1947, she worked at the Jewish children’s home in Hamburg-Blankenese, which the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had established in a villa belonging to the Warburg family of Jewish bankers that had been expropriated by the Nazis. In the early postwar years, from 1946 to 1948, Jewish children who had survived the Holocaust while in hiding lived there. Jewish children who had initially lived in the Jewish section of the DP camp in Neustadt in Holstein after their liberation were also brought to Blankenese. One of Rachel Neiger’s tasks in Blankenese was to locate their relatives. In many cases, however, this effort was unsuccessful. Children without relatives were sent to “Eretz Israel”—then the British Mandate of Palestine—with the help of Zionist organizations. 

In 1949, Rachel Neiger emigrated to the United States. There, she married for the second time in 1952. Her husband, Max Markus Neiger, was from Kraków and had survived the Holocaust as a refugee in the Soviet Union. The couple later lived in New York, where Rachel Neiger also worked in various hospitals.

She recounted her story in 1992 in a video interview published in the US-based Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.

Rachel Neiger kept the album from the Blankenese children’s home in a small cardboard box for decades and only showed it to her niece when she was nearly 80 years old. In 1994, nearly 50 years after the end of the Holocaust, Rachel Neiger brought that very box to Israel. Today, it is kept in the archives of the Museum of the Ghetto Fighters in Acre.

Her niece, Tamar Neiger, recalled how she first learned the story of the album when she sat with her aunt night after night as her aunt told her about the years of persecution and humiliation during the Holocaust: “One of those nights, she suddenly pulled out the album and said that in that home, she had been ‘worth’ something. In all the years that followed, while she worked in hospitals in New York, she never felt as needed as she did in that children’s home, where groups of children and their caregivers stopped on their way to ‘Eretz Israel.’”7

Rachel Neiger died in New York in 2003.