Who knows Fanny Ehrenreich from Bergen-Belsen?

IN

January 2021, my uncle, Gavi Schneider of Ramot, was perusing the Hebrew Yated and came across a letter written by a Mr. Yaakov Yehoshua of Rechovot.

The letter read as follows (this is a rough translation):

During World War II, our family was deported from Holland to the Westerbork Transit Camp, and from there to Bergen-Belsen. With us was a young girl named Fanny Ehrenreich. She was placed together with the children of the Star Lager in Bergen-Belsen, and she organized activities in the camp and taught us about Yiddishkeit, emunah, Yamim Tovim, etc. She always sang us a song about emunah, in the tune of zchor davar/zos nechamasi, which had the following lyrics (translated from Yiddish ): “Hashem knows what He’s doing/ He doesn’t punish anyone for no reason/ Your (Hashem’s) judgement is correct.”

I’d be very grateful to anyone who knows anything about her, if you could be in touch with me. Did she or anyone in her family survive? I don’t remember more details about her, except for one: Her father was a devout Belzer chassid.

The letter concluded with an email address to be in touch with the writer, 89-year-old Yaakov Yehoshua of Rechovot. The letter caused quite an uproar in my family — Fanny (Fayga Gittel) Ehrenreich-Schneider was my grandmother. Oma Fanny passed away in 1978 at the young age of 48. She never met any of her grandchildren. When she was alive, she didn’t tell her children much about her experiences in the war, and whatever shreds of information we had barely gave a sketch of what she’d been through in her childhood.

Zayde Schneider remarried in the ’80s, a few years after Oma Fanny died. Bubby became the family’s grandmother in every sense of the word, and we all adore her.

But Oma Fanny was a phantom grandmother, alive only in some stories we heard from my father and his siblings, but nowhere else. She’d raised her six children in Far Rockaway, but none of them stayed there, and it seemed that nobody we ever met knew Oma. All her siblings had been killed in the war. She had some cousins in Eretz Yisrael, and they were always happy to share the parts of her war story. But her life after the war? That seemed to me to be lost to the family forever.

My uncle called Mr. Yaakov Yehoshua and recorded the conversation. Mr. Yehoshua tearfully sang Oma Fanny’s song to him and reminisced a bit about his war experiences. His story meant so much to our family.

Several weeks after that phone call with my uncle Gavi, Mr. Yehoshua was niftar. Had he held on just long enough to share this vignette with us?

Three years ago, after Zayde Schneider was niftar, I went on a mission to find out more about Oma. I decided I’d collate whatever information I could find into a small booklet for the family. I would do the best I could, even if many of the details would be blank. Something is better than nothing, right? If I wanted my own children and nieces and nephews to know anything about their great-grandmother, it was time to record what we could.

I got to work, asking my father and his siblings to each write up a piece about their mother: her middos, any stories worth sharing, her legacy. The pieces the family shared are remarkable, giving insight into the kind of mother Oma was.

I also reached out to two elderly cousins of Oma’s who live in Israel. One of them, Gita, had been with Oma during the war. Both cousins kindly supplied me with vignettes and even the story of the family’s war trajectory. I took that and did further research online on various Holocaust databases where I found scraps of information.

Slowly, the picture of Oma Fanny’s war years came together.