In August 1944 Esther Zylberberg and her mother, Sara, were crammed with hundreds of others into a cattletruck bound for Auschwitz. When they reached the death camp, her mother did not pass the selection for life – Esther’s hardest memory was being parted from her that day.
Esther was sent from there to a labour camp near Hanover. In February 1945 the camp was disbanded and its inmates force-marched to Bergen-Belsen. Esther described entering “an inferno … overcrowded with living and dead corpses”.
The camp was liberated on 15 April and Esther, who had suffered from typhus, was taken to Sweden to recuperate. She found refugees were not welcome in the postwar world. No visas were issued to those without visible means of support. She had to wait two more “long and lonely years” before travelling to the UK in 1947 on a special permit as a domestic worker.
In a chapter of Survival: Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Story (2003), she wrote: “I prayed that I would not forever be consumed or destroyed by hatred … I would say that I have succeeded. But not without scars.”
Through the Yiddish theatre then flourishing in the East End of London, she met Stanislav Brunstein, an accomplished artist who had designed some of the sets. They married in 1949 and made a good life together, working hard – Stanislav as a tailor and Esther at various jobs including dental nurse and Yiddish interpreter, translator and teacher – and raising a family.
Esther was born in Łódź, Poland, one of three children of Sara (nee Rywka) and Philip Zylberberg. She recalled a “close-knit and enlightened working-class family”. Her parents were members of the Bund, the Jewish General Workers’ Union, a socialist political organisation. Esther had a happy childhood, attending a secular Jewish school, which gave her “a strong sense of Jewish identity, security and belonging” in interwar Poland, where antisemitism was rife.
Her world started to fall apart in September 1939 when the German army invaded Łódź. The Jewish population was quickly deprived of every protection. Her uncle, a journalist, was imprisoned, tortured and shot. Her brother David suffered the same fate. Her father, as a known political activist, had to escape. Esther never saw him again, nor learned what happened to him. On 1 May 1940 she, her mother and brother Peretz were among the 180,000 herded into the barbed-wire enclosure of the Łódź ghetto, where Esther lived until its liquidation in August 1944.
I first met Esther when she gave a talk at an Anti-Nazi League meeting in 1980. You could have heard a pin drop as she told her painful story with calm and dignity. Esther spoke at many anti-racist meetings, addressed the UN in New York in 1998 on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and opened the Holocaust exhibit at the Imperial War Museum in 2000. She was a key campaigner for the setting up of Holocaust Memorial Day, which was first commemorated in 2001.
Stanislav died in 1994. Esther is survived by their daughters, Lorna and Denise, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
