Elye (Chaim Elye) and Rachel (Rosza) Rosenfeld
Rachel (Rosza) was born on October 15, 1907 in a village called Tekovo, then part of Czechoslovakia, to Feigi and Zvi Hersch Braun. She was the fourth of eight children and one of five daughters. The Brauns were deeply religious, their lives revolving around the Sabbath and holidays, and they operated a wine and spirits business that had been in the family for many generations.
Following her marriage to Beno Krau, Rachel moved to the city of Munkacs, which had a larger Jewish population of around 13,500 before the Holocaust. They owned a prosperous wholesale food business and had a daughter, Vera, in 1936, who proved to be quite precocious. In November 1938, Munkacs was annexed to Hungary, an ally of the Nazis, and Beno was among the men conscripted to forced labor. Rachel recalled that Vera, then just seven years old, said to her, “We must have done something very bad to the Nazis at one time in order for them to hate us so.”
On March 19, 1944, after Hungary tried to withdraw from its alliance with Germany, the German army invaded Hungary. A Christian family in town offered to hide Vera, and Rachel wanted to do this but Beno, who had been orphaned as a child, felt that the family should stay together. Over the next three months, the Jewish population of Munkacs was liquidated. Upon arrival at Auschwitz that spring, Vera was forced to go with her paternal grandmother to one side, selected for death in the gas chambers, while Rachel was sent to the other side, selected for work. Rachel ran after Vera but was beaten by the Nazis and called a “stupid Hungarian.” Feigi and Zvi Hersch Braun were also murdered at Auschwitz. Since the precise date of their deaths isn’t known, their Yahrzeit is commemorated on the New Moon before the holiday of Shavuot, when they were deported.
Rachel and her younger sister Shari survived the war together, first at Auschwitz and then after spending a year in Bergen Belsen, where they worked in an ammunition factory and suffered from life-threatening typhus. After liberation, they made their way back home, where all they found were some photos and tablecloths that belonged to their family. Rachel's husband died of gangrene of the foot in the labor camp and three of Rachel and Shari’s siblings, Nellie, Marishka and Jeno, also perished, along with their spouses and three of their children.
Rachel and Shari escaped illegally over the border to Romania, where Shari had a fiance waiting for her. Rachel lived with them for a few months until she met a fellow survivor, Chaim Elye Rosenfeld, born in Orhei, Romania to to Nathan and Sarah Rivkah Rosenfeld. Chaim Elye’s mother and two siblings as well as his first wife and three children all perished in the Holocaust. (His father died before the war.) His children, two boys and a girl, were approximately 9, 11 and 13 years old when they were deported. The oldest had a bar mitzvah before they were taken away, and a kiddush cup that he was given for the occasion is now a family heirloom used on Passover.
Rachel and Elye were married in 1947. They moved to Bistrita, a city near his native village, and had a daughter, Dina, on May 2, 1949. When she was a year old, they tried to emigrate to Israel but Romania had closed the borders. Chaim Elye became a beloved leader of Bistrita’s decimated Jewish community. He collected funds from local residents as well as Jews in the United States who were originally from there to erect a modest memorial to those killed in the Holocaust. He was arrested in 1951 for being a threat to Communism and was imprisoned in Siberia for a year and a half. Even after his release in 1953, he had to report to the Secret Police three times a week. He died in 1954, at the age of 50. Although Dina was very young when this happened, she recalls the devastating affect that the Holocaust had on her father. In particular, she remembers how he once ran crying to the bathroom after seeing a young Christian man, a former friend of his son’s, on the street, now grown and walking with his wife and child.
Eight years after they had originally applied to leave the country, Rachel and Dina succeeded in emigrating to Israel, where their surviving brother and uncle Jude lived. They stayed there for two years under very harsh economic conditions before settling in Brooklyn, New York, after Rachel’s sister Ilonka, in America, arranged the paperwork. (The other surviving siblings, Shari and Martin, settled in Romania and the Czech Republic.)
Rachel worked in a factory sewing mink collars on coats from the age of 52 until her retirement at the age of 65. She died at the age of 94, and her tombstone has Vera’s name inscribed on it. Rachel was Bubbie to two Heschel students, Elana and Etan Rosenfeld Berkowitz.
