A tale of love and darkness

The small sign at the entrance to the rickety building in Berlin aroused the curiosity of Israeli film director Ayalet Bargur. When she came closer in order to read the sign, she was stunned. The sign showed a picture of her great-great aunt Beate Berger, who ran the “Beith Ahava” (“House of Love”) Jewish orphanage that was located in the building in the 1930s. 

As Bargur learned from the sign, Berger orchestrated the rescue of 300 of the orphanage’s children from the claws of the Nazis. 

Bargur was unable to forget her sudden encounter with her forgotten relative on the streets of Berlin. She decided to do comprehensive research on Berger’s rescue operation and to try to locate those of the orphanage’s children who were still alive. A book describing Bargur’s journey will be published in Germany. She is also working on a documentary film on the subject. 

Freedom train 

Beith Ahavah was established early in the 20th century in Berlin, and served as a home for Jewish orphans. Following the Nazi’s rise to power and the start of the systematic persecution of Germany’s Jews, Beate Berger, the orphanage’s director, decided to move her institution from Berlin to the Land of Israel in order to save the children from the Nazi terror. Beith Ahava’s successor institution, by the way, is now located in Kiryat Bialik, near Haifa. 

Berger had to overcome many difficulties in carrying out the rescue operation, most of them stemming from the refusal of the heads of the German Jewish community to recognize the impending danger, from the rigid immigration policy of the British mandate, and from the priorities of the Jewish community leaders in the Land of Israel on the issue of Jewish immigration. 

The orphanage was established by the Berlin Jewish community after WWI to take in children from Eastern Europe who had lost their parents or whose families did not have the money to care for them. Berger took over the institution in 1922, introducing innovative educational methods, some of them with the assistance of well-known educational experts and psychoanalysts. 

On April 1, 1933 the Nazis declared a general boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany. The declaration marked a turning point in the history of the institution. Believing that there was no longer a future for Jewish children in Germany, Berger decided to send them to the Land of Israel and immediately began preparing her plan. 

A short time later she traveled to Palestine and received a promise that the Jewish National Fund would allocate lands for the establishment of an institution in Kiryat Bialik, a settlement that was about to be founded to take in German Jews. After numerous attempts at persuasion, funding for the project was obtained from some of the heads of the German Jewish community. 

Since the Nazis forbade the Jews to take money out of Germany, Berger decided to smuggle the money out herself, hiding it on her person, a very risky endeavor. In order to prepare themselves for life in Palestine the children underwent several months of agricultural training and studied Hebrew. 

The first group of children and adolescents left Berlin for Palestine a short time after the eve of Passover in 1934. At the main train station the group encountered Nazi officials, who told them to “go to Palestine, and don’t come back.” 

A Race against the clock 

Bargur says that her work involved a race against the clock. Most of the witnesses are already in their 80s, and some of them died during her research. “The first thing that I did when I returned to Israel,” she says, “was to try to find out where the ‘children of Love’ were. I published ads in the German-language newspaper News of Israel, and I was completely surprised by the very large number of responses.” 

One of the responses was from Avital Ben-Horin, who had arrived in Palestine in the third rescue operation organized by Beate Berger. Ben-Horin felt the effects of the Nazi rise to power though she was only 10 at the time. “Until then I was a child just like all the other children. And then suddenly I felt that I was a foreign implant in Germany,” she recalls. 

“My parents read about the children’s immigration to the Land of Israel in the Jewish community newspapers. They were pretty far from Zionism, but when the situation in school got worse, they thought about ways to save me, and they suggested that I go to the Land of Israel until they were able to arrange things and could immigrate themselves. They always say that many Jews hesitated to leave Germany. That’s true about some of them. But others wanted to leave, and couldn't find any country that would take them in.”

Ben-Horin came to Palestine in 1936. A year later her parents came to visit. “They returned to Germany because at that time you weren’t allowed to stay in the Land of Israel illegally. And then the gates of immigration were closed to them. Later they were sent to the Theresienstadt.” 

“It was Beate Berger,” says Ben-Horin, “who saved my life. This is a Janusz Korczak story with a happy ending. The institution is still in existence in Israel. Several of those people are still alive. But we, the Israelis, don’t appreciate life. Death, on the other hand, we elevate to heroism. When Korczak died in Auschwitz together with his orphans, this was an act of heroism. But Berger saved 300 children, brought them to the Land of Israel, and didn’t die a heroic death. And it's her story that has disappeared. I would be happy to contribute to a change in this attitude.”