‘In an age of Holocaust denial, this is extraordinary proof': The one-woman archive of Belsen's atrocities

Telegraph

15-04-2025

If there is anyone who seeks to deny the enormity or depths of depravity of the Holocaust, they should perhaps pay a visit to the north London home of Hephzibah Rudofsky. There they will find a one-of-a-kind, one-woman archive of the realities of the Nazis' attempts to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.
Among the more than 100 artefacts, photographs, papers and postcards are items carefully gathered from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany – which was liberated by British troops 80 years ago today, April 15. Several feature in Traces of Belsen, a new exhibition at London's Wiener Holocaust Library.
Hephzibah's mother, Zahava, and grandmother, Rosy Kanarek, both survived what the BBC's Richard Dimbleby, the first reporter inside the camp's gates, described as 'the world of a nightmare'. About 70,000 people, mostly Jews, did not – their naked and emaciated bodies were piled around the camp.
Zahava only discovered the trove of priceless possessions upon the death of Rosy in 2001, coming across a small suitcase at the back of a cupboard while clearing out her mother's room in a home for the elderly in Israel.
Despite suffering extreme starvation and squalor in the camp, Rosy had evidently been determined to scrupulously collect and conserve every object she could. These included three tin bowls from which the family ate their daily meal. For Hephzibah, they represent not nourishment but aching hunger.
'The tinniness, the emptiness, the hollowness really affects me every time I see those bowls,' she says on a video call from a Passover holiday in Israel. 'It's chilling, in a sense, because there was so little food in them – they had scraps of turnips and water. The majority of people died of disease and starvation at Bergen-Belsen.'
There were also postcards they exchanged with family in Switzerland, discussing food parcels that would never be given to them – all part of the Nazis' propaganda efforts to dupe the outside world as to what was happening to the prisoners behind the barbed wire. 'We are healthy,' Rosy even writes in one in 1944. After the war, meticulous as ever, she reclaimed the notes she had sent to her parents, making sure to have both sides of the correspondence in her hoard.
We do not know why she amassed the collection, or how she was able to keep it in such pristine condition – she died before anybody could ask. But her granddaughter Hephzibah, now 61, has not stopped thinking about it. 'You couldn't write anything down, you couldn't keep notes of anything,' she says. 'And I wonder if my grandmother was keeping a diary in a sense. I always wonder if she felt, if she ever got out of there, this is to prove to herself what actually happened.'
After discovery of the cache, when Hephzibah was in her late 30s, 'a tap was opened'. Finally, Zahava – just eight when she was transported to the camp – felt able to start speaking about the family's ordeal.
One of the most precious items relates to Zahava's brother, Jehudi. Their mother had given him up to be hidden by a Protestant family in Holland. In the Westerbork transit camp 100 miles away, Rosy was puzzled to be passed a bag of dried beans, smuggled in by the Resistance. With nothing to cook with, what on earth was she supposed to do with them? At the bottom of the bag, however, she discovered a tiny photo of her son – alive and well. Indeed, he still is, aged 83, in Jerusalem, having been reunited with his family after the war.
Among the torn fragments of documents in the collection is a sick note from Belsen late in 1944. It records that Rosy had been given time off work as the cleaner for the camp commandant. 'Why would anyone keep all those scraps of paper?' Hephzibah asks herself in amazement.
Then there is the Honduran passport Rosy had bought in the hope the citizenship would give the family a way out of the Netherlands. In the end, it was useless. Rather, it was Zahava's papers that proved vital. Her birth in British Mandate Palestine gave her value in a potential prisoner swap and placed the family in the 'star camp' part of Belsen, where prisoners wore the Star of David sewn on to their clothing instead of uniforms. It was this British status that saved the family from being shoved into a cattle car to almost certain death at Auschwitz.
'They were literally about to board, and someone came up and said, 'You've been taken off this transport.' My mother often said that had he come 60 seconds later, the doors would have been shut,' says Hephzibah. 'Nobody would have found them and I wouldn't be here today.' Zahava's birthplace ultimately saw the family released from Belsen in an exchange in January 1945 before being sent to two further camps.
As Jewish communities around the world celebrate Passover this week, one of the items Hephzibah finds most moving is a letter sent from the Biberach internment camp in Germany in March 1945. Rosy was begging her parents to send the unleavened 'bread of affliction' Jews eat to mark their deliverance from slavery in Egypt, as told in the Book of Exodus. 'After everything they'd been through, they write to my mother's grandparents, in Zurich, and they're saying, 'We're desperate to have matzah.' I find it extraordinary that in spite of everything, they still believed in practising their religion. And Passover symbolises the freedom of the Jewish people.'
In 2009, Hephzibah and her mother began taking their story to schools across the UK. The presentation has been delivered to tens of thousands of children who, Hephzibah says, 'are absolutely mesmerised by this archive'. One listener recently suggested she emphasises that the documents she shows the pupils are the originals. 'Because in this day of artificial intelligence and misinformation, they might think it's computer-generated. So I actually reinforce that these days.'
The trauma would linger for decades. Zahava would have enduring health problems and a lifelong aversion to dogs (whose barking took her back to Belsen) and fireworks (which reminded her of gunshots). Meanwhile, Jehudi did not recognise his family, calling Rosy his 'mummy from Switzerland'. But Hephzibah carries with her Zahava's relentlessly forward-looking disposition. 'My mother made the best of everything. She never was angry. It was never 'poor me'. She literally cherished everything she had. In spite of everything she'd been through, she really felt blessed.'
Zahava made it to London in 1958, where she married pharmacologist Dr Ralph Kohn (his knighthood in 2010 would make her Lady Kohn). They had three daughters and five grandchildren.
Upon her mother's death, aged 86, in 2022, Hephzibah was still discovering objects squirrelled away. She had never before seen a set of ladles, for example, which her grandmother had taken among her belongings to Belsen.
The burden of history – and the collection – has now fallen on Hephzibah's shoulders. 'I treat it really with the most love I've got for any possessions,' she says. 'It's a huge weight of responsibility as we see rising Holocaust denial. Well, you have such proof here, such extraordinary proof. And I feel I need to impart this to the next generation – because I don't want it to become one of those things that just goes into history books.'