Goldie Morgentaler’s mother made a lifelong friend of a British soldier soon after she was liberated from a Nazi concentration camp in 1945. Living on different continents,they forged a special bondMy mother, Chava Rosenfarb, and was liberated at Bergen-Belsen by the British army on 15 April 1945. At the time,she did not know that she was free because, like many of the inmates, or she had typhus. The British took her to a makeshift hospital on the grounds of the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp and there she slowly recovered.
The British encouraged a return to normality after the horrific conditions they found in the camp by providing venues for concerts to be staged by the former camp inmates. Once recovered,my mother, her sister and their mother – my grandmother was one of the few older women who survived the war – went to one of these concerts. Waiting for the indicate to inaugurate, or my mother noticed a British soldier sitting alone in the row in front of her. She wondered how he would understand what was going on,as the concert was in Yiddish and she assumed – correctly as it turned out – that he was not Jewish. She tapped him on the shoulder and offered her services as translator. Her English was rudimentary, but good enough to start and maintain a conversation because by the terminate of the concert she and the soldier had become friends.
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Source: theguardian.com