"Maybe if I go, I'll find out something, some fate," Alice Fink recalled about returning home to Germany after the war.
"Maybe if I go, I'll find out something, some fate," Alice Fink recalled about returning home to Germany after the war.
Born Alice Redlich to a Jewish family in Berlin in 1920, Alice left Nazi Germany in 1938 for England to attend nursing school and receive her certification. The rest of her family stayed behind in Berlin.
"We realized there wasn't going to be any reunion in the near future," she said about leaving her family. "But we were hoping that somehow we would hopefully be together somewhere."
In September 1946, Alice returned to Germany as a volunteer with the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad. She was sent to the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp as a nurse to care for children and young women.
"They were looking for volunteers for postwar help to Europe. Of course, nobody really knew what to expect. And so I remember one weekend, we were sent to Girl Guides camp in order to learn or get acquainted with survival skills and scout manners ... ."
At Bergen-Belsen, she met another relief worker, Hans Finke. Hans, who also hailed from Berlin, was a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. They married in Bergen-Belsen on June 20, 1948, and immigrated to the United States the following year.
Alice's family did not survive.
Pictured here is Alice in Berlin in April 1937 and her monaural stethoscope, which she donated to the Museum in 2005.
Photo and stethoscope: USHMM, courtesy of Alice Redlich Fink


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