Kosár
Born in 1925 in Bratislava, Slovakia to an ultra-Orthodox family, Hanna Zemer (née Haberfeld) grew up in a strongly religious home. Her father, Rabbi Shlomo Haberfeld, was a prominent member of the ultra-Orthodox community in Pressburg and her grandfather, Rabbi Jacob Haberfeld, a descendant of religious scholars, was the rabbi of Tura Luka (Slovakia). Many years later, when Zemer reached the height of her career as editor of the newspaper Davar and as a leading journalist in Israel, she wrote a book about her travels in the Jewish world entitled God Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which contained a rare account of her return visit to the Ravensbruck concentration camp where she was imprisoned during the final months of World War II.
"On my travels abroad, and especially my trips to Germany, I am very careful not to eat treif. It’s a sort of demonstration of solidarity. But here at the doorway, at Ravensbruck, I would have eaten pork if I could have eaten at all. I would have eaten steak with cheese to take revenge on God for the deaths of my aunts and cousins, who counted the days of their niddah time according to the law, separated hallah from the dough, ran to the dayyan with questions about a spot on a slaughtered goose, and read from the Ze’enah U-Re’enah every free moment – and their reward was to be humiliated to the dust and tortured until they perished. Five minutes from Ravensbruck, I would even have eaten a baby goat cooked in its mother’s milk. Instead, I took a Valium."
