Luba Tryszynska-Frederick papers

Luba Tryszynska-Frederick of Poland rescued 54 Dutch children left to die at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after she was deported there in 1944 from the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp where her husband and son were killed.

Luba Tryszynska-Frederick (born Luba Tryszynska, 1918-2009) was born June 5, 1918 in a small village in Zastawie near Brest-Litovsk (Belarus) to Abraham and Victoria Trysznska. She had at least one brother, Yudel, and one sister, Lea. She married Hershel Gerceg in 1939 and they had one son, Isaac. Prior to the war, they lived in a village near Kamenets-Litovsk (Belarus).

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Hershel was drafted into the Polish Army. In 1941 the family was deported to the Pruzhany Ghetto. In January 1943, Luba, Hershel, and Isaac were deported to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp. Her son and husband were killed upon arrival. She was sent to work in the hospital. In December 1944 she was deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. One night shortly after she arrived, she heard a crying child outside of her barracks. She investigated and found 54 children outside abandoned to perish in the cold by the Nazis. The children, sometimes referred to as the “diamond children” were the sons and daughters of Dutch diamond cutters. She convinced the others in her barracks to help shelter the children, and she spent the next 18 weeks acquiring what little extra food she could get for them with the assistance of other prisoners.

When Bergen-Belsen was liberated in April 1945, 52 of the children had survived. Luba went with some the children she rescued to the Netherlands to help them reunite with their surviving families. She was nicknamed “the Angel of Bergen-Belsen” by the Dutch and encouraged to stay. She then accompanied other orphaned children to refugee camps in Sweden. While in Sweden, she met fellow Holocaust survivor Sol Frederick (b. 1914). They married and immigrated to the United States in 1947, settling in Washington, D.C.

In 1995 she went to Amsterdam for a fifty year reunion with the children she rescued. She was reunited with around 30 of those she rescued. She was also awarded the Silver Medal of Honor for Humanitarian Services by the Dutch government.