From Diana Vance

Monroe

To the Editor:

A great poet, writer and concentration camp survivor has died. Magda Herzberger was 95 when she passed away April 23, 2021. All who knew her admired her grace, her confidence and her courage and extensive imagination. And of course her love for her family and her beloved husband, Dr. Eugene Herzberger and her great love of God. Her book of Devotional Poetry is so powerful as she tells of her relationship with God.

Her courage was once again so alive when she decided in 2005 to write her autobiography. In it we learn what it was like in not one but three concentration camps when she was age 18. Each day of the writing required her to go back mentally to these camps with all their cruelty and inhumanity and put them on paper with an exactness that not many could have done so. She lived at that time in Cluj, Romania when she, her father, and other family members were taken to Auschwitz by train. She was also in a camp near Bremen, a port city in Germany. There she and 500 other women picked up debris from bombs falling by the minute day and night. To be there was a nightmare.

James P. Moore, author of "One nation Under God, The History of Prayer in America" wrote the forward to one of Magda's books, "Dream World" where the stories appeared to her in dreams at night for two decades.

It is with great love and gratitude to have been her friend since 1967 and to possess her many books filled with such a deep acquaintance to a mind so keen about evil which she saw first hand in Hitler's camps and who wrote so powerfully with poetry. For 45 years she spoke to thousands about her time in the concentration camps. Her devotedness to the victims of the Holocaust sprang from a promise to God made on what she thought was her last day on earth in Bergen Belsen death camp. At that very moment the British Army liberated the camp and rescued her. Her books demonstrate a wisdom honed by her experiences from that time to living nine years in Israel. She has left a legacy of thirteen books.

Dr. Herzberger, a retired neurosurgeon, who worked in the Monroe Clinic, lives in Fountain Hills, AZ. They have a son Henry, a daughter Monica Wolfson, two grand children and one great granddaughter.