Mrs. Reny Friedman and Mrs. Mania Hudy live today in Toronto, Canada.

Reny Friedman and her twin brother, Leo Salomon, were born in April 1937 in Heerlen, the Netherlands. When the Nazis started rounding up Jews, the Salomon family escaped to Belgium with the help of the underground.

The family hid in Brussels for a year and on a farm in Tremelo in the Ardennes Forest. Reny’s parents had heard that experiments were being performed on twins in the camps, and so they were especially afraid for their twin children. They arranged for Leo to be hidden in a monastery, while Reny was taken to hide in a convent. At the end of the war, Reny was reunited with her family, first with her father and brother, whom she didn’t recognize, and then with her mother, who had been a prisoner in Auschwitz. Although her brother chose to remain in the Netherlands, Reny immigrated to Canada in 1955, where she lived with relatives and worked a variety of jobs. In 1959, she married Henry Friedman, a survivor from Hungary, and together they raised a family. Reny’s parents eventually joined her in Canada in 1972. Reny Friedman lives in Toronto. 

Mania Hudy was born in Warsaw in 1933 and lived there with her parents and brother. In 1940 they were forced from their home and relocated to the Warsaw ghetto. They were packed into tiny living quarters with 3 or 4 other families.

In 1943 her baby sister Bronka was born and soon given away to a Nun in the hopes she would stay alive. Mania and her brother were taken to live with a Polish couple until 1944 when they were discovered and taken to Bergen Belsen, along with the Polish couple who hid them. They were liberated together and were sent to a DP camp always wondering about baby Bronka. Baby Bronka was found in 1949 in Belgium alive and well at the age of six. The family moved to Israel and Mania settled in Toronto.