Bracha Scheinman photograph collection

Berthe Silber (now Bracha Scheinman) was born November 2, 1930, in Antwerp, Belgium to Chaim and Mania (Wasser) Silber and had two sisters: Sara (b. 1934) and Chava, who died as a young child before WWII. Chaim worked as a diamond cutter. After the Nazi occupation of Belgium, Berthe and her family fled to Bagneres-deLuchon, France, where they were arrested in October 1940 and sent to a detention camp near Toulouse, France. A few days later, the family escaped in the middle of the night and fled to a nearby refugee camp. In November 1940, they learned that the French police were rounding up refugees for internment and they fled again, settling temporarily in the village of Eauze, France. Berthe remained there until June 1942 when she was sent to Faverges, a children's home in the Haute-Savoie region of France directed by a Swiss woman by the name of Sina Jecklin. Since the home would accept only one child per family, Berthe's sister was not permitted to join her. In August 1942, Berthe received a letter from her parents telling her that they had been taken to the Le Vernet internment camp, but that they were still hoping to get Sara into Faverges. This was their final communication before Chaim and Mania were sent to Draney and deported to Auschwitz where they both perished. Later that summer, Berthe was guided to the Swiss border by Emma and Walter Gianinni and smuggled across in the company of Rosa Spiegel. Berthe and Sara were taken to Basel, Switzerland, where they were housed by the parents of Sina Jecklin. After a few months, the girls were moved to the Jewish orphanage in Basel where they lived for the rest of the war. In September 1945, Berthe immigrated to Palestine with a Youth Aliyah group, sailing on board the Mataroa. Soon after her arrival, she settled in Kibbutz Neve Eitan. Later, Berthe married Jakob Scheinman, a survivor from Tarnobrzeg, Poland, who had survived the war in Siberia. From 1945 to 1946, he made his way to Germany where he lived temporarily in the Wetzlar displaced persons camp before immigrating to Palestine aboard an illegal refugee ship.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The collection was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Bracha Scheinman in 1999.