This interview was a true honor for me. LEST WE FORGET!
Rena Quint was born as Freida “Freidel” Lichtenstein in December 1935 in the city of Piotrkow Tribunalski, Poland. In 1939, when Rena was three years old, the Nazis invaded and occupied her hometown. In October 1942, her mother and her two older brothers were deported to the extermination camp of Treblinka where they were murdered. Rena, who was not yet seven years old, was deported with her father to a concentration camp, where she pretended to be a boy in order to survive. When Rena’s father was murdered, she was left alone in the camp. She was finally sent to Bergen Belsen concentration camp. In the various camps she was interned she was adopted by different women, but they all died. At the end of the war, Rena went to Sweden, where she was adopted by a Holocaust survivor who passed away a few months later. In 1946, Rena emigrated to the United States with an adoptive mother, also a Holocaust survivor, who after three months also passed away as a result of her poor physical condition. Rena was then adopted by a Jewish couple who didn’t have children. Rena earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education and worked as a teacher in schools and, as a lecturer at Adelphi University in New York and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1984, Rena and her husband emigrated to Israel with their four children who were already married. Rena has been volunteering for more than 30 years at Yad Vashem where she meets with groups from around the world.
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