Quilt recalls horrors of Nazi cruelty

Quilts are pieces of cloth sewn together that in many cases tell history. Not all are designed to remember happy times. For Rosa Freund, the quilt she recently completed looks back on when she and others lived through the tyranny of Nazism.

A Holocaust survivor who started her life in concentration camps when she was 17 years old, Freund gathered patches from friends and then created a quilt to be a silent witness of those terrible days more than six decades ago when she was taken from her home on the outskirts of Budapest, Hungary.

One of the patches is of blue and white stripes, the colors of the uniform she wore in one camp. On the patch is a pocket that bears a gold number 672. "That was my work number," the small-framed woman said.

Above the pocket is a candle of remembrance, which Freund said is important for her. It marks the horrors she saw at places such as Birkenau, Auschwitz and other death camps.

While 672 is a number she remembers, Freund almost had another number. She was one of about 800 people standing in line and was near the place where her arm would have been tattooed with a number. "They ran out of ink before they got to me," she said.

So, unlike untold hundreds of thousands who were "inked" crudely with a number, Freund was not. She also took an old photo of her brother, Moshe; her sister, Klara and her taken before they were sent to concentration camps and had it transposed on a white piece of cloth and sewn to the quilt. The photo was discovered after World War II and was in her brother's possession. He was living in Israel.

Perhaps the most telling of her personally designed patches is one of three smokestacks and the buildings that those who were to be killed entered.

"I lived three blocks from the crematoria," Freund said.

Years later, those days of being near the crematoria came back in a haunting way. Freund said she was at a doctor's office in the United States because of a skin problem. The doctor decided to burn off some of her dry skin. The smell of her own burning flesh rose to her nostrils, bringing back the stench of bodies being burned more than 60 years ago.

Freund was one of five Holocaust survivors who made a trip recently to Fort Huachuca and Sierra Vista to speak about the time of death and destruction unleashed against Jews and others in Europe by Germany's Nazi regime.

The program was part of an educational process of the Holocaust survivors of southern Arizona who meet weekly at the Jewish Family and Children Service of Southern Arizona. For the past five years, the group has come to the post to speak to military members, civilians and schoolchildren. This year's event was called "Children in Crisis, Voices of the Holocaust."

Exhibits about the Holocaust from the Afikim Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to furthering Jewish life, also are on display.

Freund completed the quilt just before April 15, Holocaust Day. The quilt's appearance at the fort was the first of many planned for outside Tucson.

Tucson Citizen