Toronto-based Holocaust survivor Yehuda Danzig, 82, was startled when he saw a photo of himself and his brother in a concentration camp published in the Times of Israel.
The image is deceptively cheerful.
Taken in April 1945, it shows a dozen or so children smiling through a barbed wire fence. They are prisoners at Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi Germany concentration camp, and they have just been liberated.
Yehuda Danzig, 82, recognized two boys in the picture after it was recently published in the Times of Israel. One was him at the age of 11. The other was his brother Michael, who was 12 at the time.
It was the first and only photo he’d seen of himself as a prisoner.
“I started to cry,” says the soft-spoken Danzig. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Danzig had been in the kitchen reading the newspaper on his tablet when the black-and-white still frame caught his eye. It was taken from the Holocaust documentary German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, shot at 14 different camps and sites of atrocities in Austria, Germany and Poland, including Auschwitz, after the fall of Hitler.
Source: Documenting Anti-Semitism © Steve Russell