Very few Jews survived the persecution. Some returned from the camps; others had survived in hiding or under an assumed identity, or had managed to leave the country in time. Most of them had lost everything: families were torn apart and many relatives were murdered. Many of those who were rescued were now homeless, with neither clothing nor a place to stay, and had to rely on assistance. They often decided to emigrate.
Twelve-year-old Samuel Bak survived together with his mother Mitzia Bak in a Benedictine convent in Vilna (today Vilnius). His father and grandparents had been shot. Mitzia and Samuel Bak were among the few survivors of what was once a large Jewish community in Vilna. The rest of their lives were marked by their experiences in the ghetto and the constant fear of death. After the war, mother and son dreaded a future in the Soviet dictatorship. They fled Lithuania, hoping to emigrate to Palestine. They traveled with forged travel passes through Poland to Berlin. In the fall of 1945 they found shelter in the Landsberg am Lech Displaced Persons (DP) camp. Samuel Bak was able to study painting in Munich. His mother married Natan Markowsky, whom she met in the DP camp. The family was finally able to emigrate to Israel in 1948. Samuel Bak later became a successful artist.
Alice Löwenthal survived in various hiding places in and around Berlin. She carried with her the keys to her apartment in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district. They gave her hope that she would one day return. After the war she discovered that her building had not been destroyed and that she could open the apartment door with her key, but people she did not know were living there. A short time later, she did get her apartment back. Alice Löwenthal learned that her daughters Ruth and Brigitte had been deported to Auschwitz in August of 1944 and murdered there. She had entrusted them to a family in Weimar because neighbors had become suspicious of her hiding place in Strausberg near Berlin. Alice Löwenthal never recovered from the loss of her daughters. Her husband, too, did not return from Auschwitz. In 1947 she married Willy Nickel, the son of her helper. A year later their daughter Eva was born.
The brothers Robert and Gérald Finaly survived in hiding in a Grenoble children’s home in the care of the director, Antoinette Brun, a Catholic. The children’s parents, Fritz and Anni Finaly, were deported in 1944 and murdered in Auschwitz. A child custody battle flared up when after the war Brun refused to hand over the Jewish orphans to their aunts in New Zealand and Israel. She had the children baptized in 1948. In 1950, a court ruling awarded them to the relatives. Antoinette Brun still did not release the children. Because they had been baptized and were thus considered Catholic, she received the support of church representatives. Catholic clerics hid the Finaly children and secretly brought them to Spain. The case soon escalated into a scandal. Only after sustained public pressure were Robert and Gérald Finaly able to emigrate to Israel in the summer of 1953.
