Yuen: At 91, this Holocaust child survivor celebrates 80 years since her liberation

Eight decades after her family’s liberation from a Nazi labor camp, Reva Kibort sometimes feels the urge to call one of her four older siblings to ask something. A forgotten name of an uncle. A detail about their mother.

Then it dawns on her that she cannot. She is the only one left.

Kibort, 91, is the last living sibling from a remarkable family of Holocaust survivors. As children, the five siblings lost both parents and a sister during the war. They survived the disease and starvation that killed others in the Warsaw Ghetto. They escaped cold-blooded executions and being carted off to death camps.

With some luck, quick-wittedness and an instinct to look after one another, the five made it out alive after Soviet forces liberated prisoners from a forced labor camp in Częstochowa, Poland, on Jan. 17, 1945. The siblings eventually all resettled in Minnesota, where they built new lives from scratch and reared their families, never forgetting the terrors they endured.

On Friday, Kibort will remember the 80th anniversary of her liberation, alongside proof of her family’s resilience: Many of the roughly 140 family members who are descended from the five siblings will celebrate with her.

Kibort and her late husband, Ben, created a storybook life in the Twin Cities, where Kibort was taken in by Jewish ­foster parents in 1947. The Kiborts sent their kids to college and welcomed grandchildren and great-grands into the world.

Not a day goes by when Kibort doesn’t ask why her life was spared. She thinks she knows the answer.

“There had to be a purpose for my survival: to sit here and tell you what happened to our people,” she says from her living room in St. Louis Park. “Someone has to survive, to be a witness. Otherwise, no one would believe what happened.”

Stories like Kibort’s are all the more precious as the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles. Last year the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany estimated there were about 245,000 survivors still alive worldwide.

To have five Jewish siblings emerge from the Holocaust alive is “very unusual,” said John Curatola, a senior historian at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, where a testimonial from Kibort is featured in its liberation exhibit. Firsthand accounts from survivors like Kibort are all the more important as conspiracy theorists try to deny or diminish the Holocaust, during which 6 million Jews were murdered.

“She’s told her story dozens if not hundreds of times,” Curatola says. “However, it needs to be told again and again. If we don’t discuss these things and bring them to the fore, they will happen again.”

Born Rivka Mandelbaum, she was 6 years old and living with her family in Warsaw when World War II broke out. Her father went looking for his kids when he was killed during a bombing attack in 1939.

She has no pictures of her mom and struggles to remember her face. Kibort’s last memory of her mother alive was in the Warsaw Ghetto, when she and Kibort’s sister were on a truck to be sent to the Treblinka death camp in 1942.

Kibort and her other siblings — four girls and one boy — escaped the ghetto by looking after one another and playing it smart. Their light-colored hair helped them blend in, and all but Kibort, the youngest, could speak fluent Polish because they were old enough to attend schools. On a train to Demblin in hopes of finding relatives, the older Mandelbaum kids convinced the Yiddish-speaking Kibort to pretend to be mute, lest anyone discover they were Jewish.

There in Demblin, the Mandelbaums and other Jews were rounded up and sent to a forced labor camp. On a stop along the train ride there, the siblings knew how much they were hated.

“Polish people were yelling at us in the boxcars, ‘I’m glad you’re going away! We’re going to take your places. We’re going to take your homes,” Kibort said.

At another labor camp, in Częstochowa, the 11-year-old Kibort witnessed more horrors. She was with a group of 10 younger children and holding a baby when a Nazi soldier told her to “throw away” the infant and run. She set the infant down and clambered into a pile of dirty laundry. From the heap she watched the same soldier gun down all of the children, including the baby.

“The question is why? Why would this soldier tell me to run?” Kibort says. “I always felt that maybe for a split-second, he had a heart or a conscience, or maybe I reminded him of one of his children.”

Reva’s son Phil Kibort said as a boy growing up in Minneapolis and St. Louis Park, he heard his parents — both of them Holocaust survivors — speak of the atrocities they witnessed. New details, often horrific, emerged every time.

“I’m amazed my mom can function at all, over the past 80 years or even now,” he says. “There are days I’m just amazed she doesn’t go crazy.”

But even amid the trauma, she had her siblings to protect her. In the camps or on the run, they grabbed her arm and led her to safety; in the barracks at night, they sang Jewish songs together quietly from their bunks. Kibort says she wouldn’t have survived if her siblings weren’t beside her.

“We had each other. We talked to each other. We kept saying over and over again, ‘We’re going to make it. We’re going to live. We’re going to survive,’” she says.

After their captivity, the siblings eventually broke off into smaller groups. Kibort’s odyssey took her from a Catholic orphanage in Poland to a displaced persons camp in Germany, where she was reunited with her other sisters. She and her sister Eda got the chance to emigrate to the United States in 1947.

The Jewish-aid organization HIAS placed Kibort, then 14, with a foster family in Minneapolis. That random assignment forged a path for the rest of the siblings to eventually make their way to Minnesota, too.

Kibort said future generations in her family will remember Jan. 17 as a day of freedom from oppression. And yet she’s not blind to the hatred that still exists. Reports of antisemitism have reached record levels in recent years, especially following the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israelis. In 2023, the Anti-Defamation League tracked 8,873 antisemitic incidents across the United States, more than in the previous three years combined.

As Kibort recounts her story, tears stream down nephew Steve Ptaszek’s face. His mom, Anne, was Kibort’s oldest sister. In Minnesota the five siblings, he says with a smile, were known as “The Council,” always sitting together at bar and bat mitzvahs and other family gatherings. In quieter moments, the siblings sought each other to validate what they experienced.

“They always talked among themselves to understand it — it was like group therapy — as opposed to a lot of other survivors who just shoved it down,” he says.

But recalling the memories, even for Kibort, is still painful.

“Oh, it’s hard to talk,” she tells me at one point, overwhelmed with emotion.

A niece reminds Kibort that she doesn’t need to keep going.

“Yes, I do,” Kibort says. “It’s important they know.”