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Monika Barzel lit one of six torches at the State Opening Ceremony of Holocaust Remembrance Day at Yad Vashem in 2025.
Monika Barzel
Monika Barzel
Monika Barzel was born in 1937 in Berlin. Her father, Eugen, was a doctor, and her mother, Edith, worked as a surgical nurse. Eugen escaped to England, and Edith had to work long hours at the Jewish hospital in Berlin to support the family, so Monika’s grandmother, Gertrud, raised her. All three lived in one room in an apartment block in Berlin. Due to her ever-present hunger, most of Monika’s early memories focus on food.
When the deportations began in late 1941, Jewish patients whose condition had improved were sent from the hospital to the extermination camps. In an effort to avoid this fate, the doctors and nurses withheld drugs and treatment from the patients, hoping to save their lives. They acted in the full knowledge that, should they be found out, they would be deported along with the patients.
In September 1942, Gertrud was deported to Theresienstadt, where she was murdered. Monika was forced to live with her mother at the hospital, along with the children of four other doctors. From that time until liberation, Monika passed her days at the hospital with no schedule or framework. The nurses and patients were her only friends.
In late February 1943, the Fabrik (Factory) Aktion in Berlin saw the roundup and deportation of Jewish forced laborers to Auschwitz, in order to empty Berlin of Jews. In May, the Gestapo ordered Walter Lustig, the director of the Jewish hospital, to downsize his staff. He was forced to choose 300 people, who were then deported to Auschwitz. Monika boarded the train, but was later told to get off.
Monika contracted diphtheria and other diseases, but she recuperated despite the lack of treatment. She passed an entire winter in her room because she didn’t have shoes to wear. From 1944, she spent many nights in shelters due to the bombing of Berlin. She often had to make her way to the shelter alone as her mother was working. From time to time, she slipped on the steep stairs in the darkness and fell into the cellar.
Monika stayed in the hospital until the end of the war. When the Red Army liberated the facility, hundreds of Jews were still alive there. Aware of the murderous and violent tendencies of the Red Army soldiers, the survivors were gripped by fear, even during the liberation period. After liberation, Edith and Monika left Berlin for Sweden and then traveled to London. Edith married Rudi Friedman, a Holocaust survivor from Berlin, and they had a son. Rudy raised Monika as his own daughter.
Monika completed her dentistry studies in London and immigrated to Israel in 1963. She settled in Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi on the Syrian border with her husband, Alan, and found herself back in bomb shelters during the Six-Day War. Monika worked as a dentist in the Upper Galilee, and then around the country—from Kiryat Shmona in the north to Eilat in the south—until she reached the age of 70. Alan succumbed to cancer at age 59. Despite the emotional strain, Monika continued to work and volunteer.
Monika and Alan z”l have two children, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.