The Holocaust survivors who lived in the Romanian town of Targu Mures were sceptical when a group of Scots arrived offering help. Too many times visitors had pledged their support and delivered nothing more than empty promises. Since they had emerged starved and brutalised from the liberation of the Nazi death camps they had become a forgotten people.
By some miracle they had survived the systematic murder of six million of their fellow Jews yet their struggle had been far from over. Many of the camp victims had lost their entire families; everything they once owned was gone and for some who then found themselves trapped behind the Iron Curtain only loneliness and crushing poverty lay beyond their emancipation.
It is 25 years since Ethne Woldman, chief executive of Jewish Care Scotland, travelled to the Transylvanian town of Targu Mures and discovered hundreds of former camp inmates were living hand to mouth. To her horror she found one year-old woman living out her final years in a tiny chicken coop with no water or electricity.
Others she met had so little money they bought bread by the slice while neighbours were sharing one pair of spectacles to a block of apartments. Ethne, 79, had travelled to the town as part of a delegation from East Renfrewshire Council on a mercy mission to help tackle the Romanian orphanage crisis when she had asked if there was a Jewish community she could visit locally.
Children survivors of Auschwitz, wearing adult-size prisoner jackets, stand behind a barbed wire fence. More than a million people, most of them Jewish, were murdered at Auschwitz pictured. World leaders will gather today to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz pictured. When she eventually tracked down the community Ethne was appalled that traumatised victims of state-sanctioned genocide were suffering in such dire circumstances.
