AP — In the last months of World War II, Lola Kantorowicz tried her best to hide her pregnancy. She succeeded because most of the prisoners at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp had bellies that were distended and bloated from extended starvation.

As she went into labor in March 1945, the Russians were advancing through Germany, and Bergen-Belsen was in chaos. Her daughter, Ilana, was born on March 19, 30 days before the camp was liberated by the British.

Now 81, Ilana Kantorowicz Shalem is among the youngest Holocaust survivors. She survived only because she was born when the Nazi leadership was in disarray as the war was ending. Otherwise, she most certainly would have been killed.

More than eight decades after the end of the Holocaust, Shalem is sharing her story — and her mother’s story — for the first time, realizing how few Holocaust survivors are left.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed across the world on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the death camps, where some 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were killed. The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2005 establishing the day as an annual commemoration.

About 6 million European Jews and millions of other people, including Poles, Roma, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ people, were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. Some 1.5 million were children.

Commemorations this year are taking place amid a rise of antisemitism that gained traction during the two-year-long war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Shalem’s mother and father met as teenagers in the Tomaszow Ghetto in Poland. Lola Rosenblum was from the town, while Hersz (Zvi) Abraham Kantorowicz was moved to the ghetto from Lodz, Poland.

After spending several years in the ghetto under hard labor conditions, including losing family members, they were shuffled through several labor camps, where they were able to continue meeting........

© The Times of Israel