The following is a synopsis of Rachel Levy’s book which recounts her life before, during and after the Holocaust.
Rachel Levy was born on 30 April 1930 in a small village called Bhutz in the Carpathian Mountain region, which was then part of Czechoslovakia and is now in the Ukraine. Her family were religious, and they lived a simple, rural life, with her mother running a haberdashery shop. In 1938, their village was taken over by the Hungarians and in 1942, her father and all the able-bodied men from the village were taken to a forced labour camp – Rachel never saw him again.
In March 1944, the Hungarian police rounded up the Jews and force them into a ghetto in Solotvyno. After a month, Rachel, her mother Shlima, her older brother Chaskel and younger siblings, Rivka and Itku, and baby brother Ben Zvi were piled into trucks and taken to Auschwitz. On arrival, Rachel was separated from her mother and younger siblings who were taken to the gas chambers and murdered.
In Auschwitz, Rachel was subjected to overpowering hunger and cruelty and numerous selections by Dr Josef Mengele. In the autumn of 1944, she was moved by train to another camp where she dug ditches, before being forced onto a death march to Bergen-Belsen where she witnessed her auntie Ruchel die right next to her on the floor.
After Bergen-Belsen was liberated, Rachel’s brother Chaskel came to find her. They reunited with family in Teplice and lived there happily until she and her brother left for the UK on a transport to Millisle, outside Belfast in Northern Ireland, provided by the Central British Fund. Rachel recuperated in Millisle and then moved to a hostel in South London where she started working as an apprentice dressmaker. She met Phin, a printing engineer, and they married and had two children – Martin and Shelley, and she now has two grown-up grandchildren Hannah and Michael.
