Barry: Pure courage and survival

Mar 3 2010 by Barry Gibson

I WAS sad to learn this week of the death of Ibi Ginsburg.

Ibi and her husband, Valdemar, were kind enough to invite me to their home in Elland last year to speak about their wartime experiences.

But there’s was not a story of dodging bullets in Normandy or avoiding bombs during the Blitz. This was the story of the greatest crime in the history of humanity – the Holocaust.

Although the Jewish couple spent most of their lives happily married in peaceful West Yorkshire, neither of them could escape the horror of the things they lived through in their early years.

Ibi, who grew up in Hungary, was wrenched away from her mother at the gates of Auschwitz. She never saw her again.

Ibi and one of her sisters were taken into the camp where their heads were shaved and they were ordered to shower. She noticed that the soap her captors gave her wouldn’t lather. It was made of human skin.

Val spent three years in a Lithuanian ghetto surviving on bits of scavenged potato peel. Then he struggled through another year of hard labour in Dachau work camp as “a walking skeleton”. By the time the war was over his extended family had shrivelled from 14 to one.

After the war Ibi and Val met in a hospital near Dachau, fell in love and married. They moved to England in 1948 and went to work in the mills of West Yorkshire which were crying out for labour.

They sat in their comfortable living room one Saturday morning last January and told me all this. The horror of their stories from six decades earlier seemed completely out of place in the tranquil, domestic surroundings of a semi-detached house in Elland.

We spoke for a good two hours as Ibi and Val went through the details of their awful experiences. Perhaps it was the passage of time, but neither of them displayed any emotion as they described the murder of their loved ones and their own years of starvation and toil.