From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, July 13, 2022
Biden holds extended conversation with two Holocaust survivors at Yad Vashem
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US President Joe Biden speaks with two Holocaust survivors for several minutes at the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem.
Biden meets and shakes hands with Rena Quint and Giselle (Gita) Cycowicz. Cycowicz was born in 1927 in Chust, which was then part of Czechoslovakia. She was rounded up and confined in the ghetto before being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and later to forced labor camps, according to Yad Vashem.
Quint was born in 1935 in Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland. In 1942, her mother and her two older brothers were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp, where they were murdered. Rena and her father were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where her father was murdered. She was eventually sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
“I just want you to know, in the Biden family, no woman is as old as any man,” says Biden to the two women, to laughs.
“As my mother would say, God love you, dear,” says Biden. “She wasn’t Jewish, but she was Irish.”
Biden speaks with the two women for longer than scheduled, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken — whose stepfather is a Holocaust survivor — also joins the conversation, as does Prime Minister Yair Lapid and President Isaac Herzog.
The Times of Israel Community.