A prisoner uses pebbles to mark his bingo card in the prison yard of the Regional Penitentiary in Villarica, Paraguay, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. Prisoners pay per bingo card and the winner takes all. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
Friedländer went into hiding, taking off the yellow star that Jews were obliged to wear. She recalled getting her hair dyed red, reasoning that “people think Jews don’t have red hair.”She said that 16 people helped keep her under the radar over the next 15 months.
That ended in April 1944 when she was taken in by police after being stopped for an identity check after leaving a bunker following an air raid. She said she quickly decided to tell the truth and say that she was Jewish.“The running and hiding was over,” she said. “I felt separated from the fate of my people. I had felt guilty every day; had I gone with my mother and my brother, I would at least have known what had happened to them.”Friedländer arrived in June 1944 at the packed Theresienstadt camp. In the spring of 1945, she recalled later, she saw the arrival of skeletal prisoners who had been forced onto death marches from
“At that moment, we heard of the death camps, and at that moment I understood that I would not see my mother and my brother again,” she said. Both were killed at the Auschwitz death camp.Her father had fled in 1939 to Belgium. He later went to France, where he was interned, before being deported in 1942 to Auschwitz, where he was also killed.
Shortly after the camp’s liberation, she married Adolf Friedländer, an acquaintance from Berlin whom she met again at Theresienstadt. He had a sister in America, and — after months in a camp for displaced persons — they arrived in New York in 1946.
Friedländer stayed away from Germany for 57 years. She and her husband became U.S. citizens; she worked as a tailor and later ran a travel agency.The ritual recalls the foot-washing Jesus performed on his 12 apostles at their Last Supper together before he would be taken away to be crucified.
Chalhoub said he doesn’t participate in the Friday reenactment, which he said has become entrenched in Quraye. On social media, he added, it often draws mixed reactions, with some criticizing aspects of it as “backward.”Charbel Joseph Antoun, 37, portraying Jesus, falls to the ground during a Good Friday reenactment of the crucifixion in Quraye, near the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon, Friday, April 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Charbel Joseph Antoun, 37, portraying Jesus, falls to the ground during a Good Friday reenactment of the crucifixion in Quraye, near the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon, Friday, April 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)Antoun said scenes like the hoisting of the cross and the flogging are done in a calculated and “professional” manner. “We do this out of a good heart,” he said.