members, "and John had to take me aside and say, 'You will never lack for bread again.' Slowly, we began to believe him."
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They worked at the Red Cross for several months before joining a Jewish youth group that hoped to emigrate to Israel. Rena and Danka decided to stay in Holland, though, because they had fallen in love with DutchmenRena with the Red Cross commander. On July 29, 1947, two years after the war, Rena Kornreich married John Gelissen.
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Rena and John emigrated to the United States in 1954. They have four children, Sylvia, Joseph, Peter, and Robert, and three grandchildren, Shaun, Julia, and Zachary John. They have retired in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, which remind Rena of the Carpathian Mountains in Poland.
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"I found a good husband and have a good life . . . but I will never forget. Every year on May second John gives me white and red carnations, to celebrate the anniversary of our liberation.
This day is more important than your birthday
, he writes,
because without this day there would be no birthdays to celebrate. Love, John
."
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Danka married Elie Brandel in 1948, and emigrated to the United States in 1951. They have two children, Norman and Sara, and five grandchildrenAndrew, Eric, Jamie, Jenna, and Adam. Gertrude (Rena's oldest sister) emigrated to the United States in 1921. She married David Shane and had one son, Irvin. All of the family photographs from before the war come from Gertrude, who died in New York in 1994 at the age of eighty-eight. Rena has no idea what fate befell Zosia and her children, Herschel and Ester Stuhr. Despite efforts to locate the children in hopes they had been hidden in a Christian orphanage, Rena was never able to find her niece or nephew. Any information about their fates would be appreciated. It is believed that Nathan Stuhr, Zosia's husband, was lost in Siberia.
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The fate of Sara and Chaim Kornreich is unknown. Rena believes that they were among the one and a half million Jews exterminated
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