A brave 92-year-old Bronx woman who helped rescue Jews from Germany-occupied Hungary during World War II was honored Thursday for her heroic past.
Berta Davidovitz Rubinsztejn was one of dozens of rescuers who helped Hungarian Jews escape the Nazis by disguising herself as a Gentile and working with the Zionist underground youth movement Dror Habonim.
She was reunited Thursday with one of the refugee orphans she saved from the streets of Budapest and took in as her own.
“I am standing here only because of you, Berta,” said Meir Brand, 79, as he thanked Rubinsztejn during an emotional ceremony at the Riverdale YM-YWHA.
“I was the only survivor of my whole family,” he added.
Brand’s parents had paid a smuggler to take the boy — only 7 years old — safely out of the Jewish ghetto in the Polish town of Bochnia in 1943 before the Nazis sent them to Auschwitz.
For nearly a year, Brand lived alone, shivering on the streets of Budapest before Rubinsztejn found him.
“He was like a son to me,” she said. “I had to look out for him.”
One month later, the pair was among the 1,684 passengers on a train bound for neutral Spain after journalist Rudolf Kasztner made a deal to provide trucks to the Nazis in exchange for the safe passage of Jews out of Hungary.
But negotiations were slow, and the passengers spent months at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp before eventually being sent to Switzerland.
In 1945, Rubinsztejn and Brand made it safely to Israel, where Brand was adopted by cousins, eventually met his wife and raised a family of his own.
But the two stayed in touch.
Rubinsztejn — now a great-grandmother who has called the Bronx home for 55 years — was given the Jewish Rescuers Citation by B’Nai B’Rith at Thursday’s event.
“What I did is what everybody should do,” Rubinsztejn said of her courageous work.
“Give children your love and the world grows up a better place.”
