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Recalling Millie Baran, whose mark on the Yiddish world lives on
Millie Baran, a Holocaust survivor who served for many years as a “camp mother” at the socialist Yiddish summer camp, Hemshekh, and spoke publicly, even on television, about her Holocaust experiences, passed away on April 3. She was 100 years old.
Millie, whose late husband, Mikhl Baran, was the camp’s director, was known for her warmth and mentshlekhkeyt (kindness). As many former Hemshekh campers will tell you: Nishto keyn tsveyte — no one could replace her.
Born Mila Persky in 1926 in the town of Oszmiana (Oshmene in Yiddish) in what was then Poland and is now Belarus, she attended a Tarbut school, a secular Zionist Hebrew-language school. An ardent Zionist herself, she often praised the education she received there.
After Millie’s passing, her daughters, Ruth Baran Gerold and Janice Baran Blatt, talked about her fluency in both Yiddish and Hebrew in an interview with the author. “She spoke a beautiful, elegant Yiddish,” Ruth said. “In fact, her Hebrew education at Tarbut enriched her Yiddish.”
During the war, Millie was interned in the Oszmiana ghetto, the Vilna ghetto and several labor camps. She credited her survival to a specific forced labor detail on a Polish farm where the prisoners were permitted to eat the apples that had fallen on the ground.
“My mother said, ‘This farmer wasn’t the worst, and this guard wasn’t the worst, so they let us eat,’” Ruth said. “This source of nutrition was key to her survival.”
One day, when Millie’s hands became bloody from shoveling, a Polish woman, also a slave laborer, approached her. “She heard Millie singing and was so captivated, she offered to do Millie’s shoveling if Millie would sing as they worked,” Ruth said. “Throughout her life, she always emphasized that even the smallest acts of kindness from strangers could have a tremendous impact.”
Despite starvation rations, Millie would not eat the meat given to the prisoners in their soup, since it wasn’t kosher. She valued Jewish tradition even in the most dire conditions, trading the non-kosher dish for a piece of bread, or whatever another prisoner would be willing to exchange for it.
Many years later, this devotion was apparent to Forverts editor Rukhl Schaechter.
“Millie was very principled, whether it was about supporting Israel or keeping Jewish traditions,” Schaechter said. “When I worked with her husband Mikhl at Camp Kinder Ring during the 1980s, Millie, who would come up on weekends, always asked the waiter for a fish or pasta meal; she never ate the chicken or meat dishes. I once asked her if this was because she was vegetarian, and she said no, she simply didn’t eat meat in a non-kosher establishment. I was still a secular Jew then and was in awe of her willpower. Little did I know that many years later, I would do the same.”
After the war, Millie and Mikhl, who was also from Oszmiana, encountered each other in Lodz, Poland, a city that drew many survivors. They fell in love and married. In 1949, they emigrated to the United States.
As a camp mother, Millie’s loving nature impacted the lives of hundreds of children of survivors. One former camper, Moish Russ, recalled her warmth and gentleness when he was a young boy in the 1960s. “I was still homesick at times. Millie was extraordinarily kind and carried herself with a confidence and gentleness I didn’t know in my own mother. The feeling of her comforting, soapy hands was a joy. I felt loved.”
“I remember her examining my fingernails to be certain they were clean,” said another former camper, George Rothe. “Years later, whenever I saw her, I’d hold out my hands to let her inspect them. It became a joke between us.”
Millie’s daughters both spoke of their mother’s elegance and fastidious nature, even in the clothes she wore as a prisoner in the ghettos and labor camps.
“Millie always made sure she kept a needle,” Ruth said.“She hid it in her blanket. Even in the camps, she made sure she never had a dropped hem.”
That commitment to dressing properly came up again years later, after Millie and Mikhl had immigrated to New York. Janice, then six, was sitting with her mother on the bus when a woman passed by with her hem undone. “Can you believe it?” Millie said, “She’s free here, and yet she goes around like that!”
While Millie had an enormous impact on the campers and staff at Camp Hemshekh, admiration for her goes far beyond. Her life inspired a jazz collaboration by Albert Marques and Amplify Voices called “Mir Zaynen Do” (“We Are Here”) that was performed at the iconic Joe’s Pub in January 2025.
Millie’s and Mikhl’s stories also made their way onto television when they were invited to share their Holocaust experiences on The View in 2020. After Millie’s passing, The View’s host Whoopie Goldberg shared the sad news on the show and paid tribute to Millie’s accomplishments.
Millie never took her freedom for granted, Ruth said. “Her favorite holiday was pesakh (Passover), and she died right before pesakh. Every year, she would stand by the kids’ table and say, ‘We were slaves in Egypt and I was a slave by Hitler. Now I’m an American and a free Jew.’ ”
In addition to her daughters Janice and Ruth, Milllie is survived by grandsons Ben, Jonathan, and Sam, and great-grandchildren Sophia, Joshua, Ava, Olivia and Billie.
The post Recalling Millie Baran, whose mark on the Yiddish world lives on appeared first on The Forward.
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Ukraine, Russia Swap 193 Prisoners of War Each in US, UAE-Facilitated Exchange
Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) react after a swap, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, at an unknown location in Ukraine, April 24, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Anatolii Stepanov
Ukraine and Russia conducted a prisoner of war swap on Friday, sending back 193 captured personnel each in an exchange both sides said was facilitated by the United States and the United Arab Emirates.
“It is important that there are exchanges and that our people are returning home,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a post on Telegram.
His chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, and Russia‘s defence ministry said the US and the UAE had assisted with the exchange.
Russia and Ukraine have conducted many prisoner swaps over four years of war, exchanging thousands of captives in total.
Zelenskiy said some of the returned captives, who included soldiers, border guards, and police, had injuries, while others had faced criminal charges in Russia.
In Ukraine, returning captives streamed off buses, many draped in their country’s flag and overwhelmed with emotion.
“It still hasn’t sunk in that I’m home, I was in captivity for three years … our Ukrainian sky, our trees — this is happiness,” said Serhiy, a soldier, who gave only his first name.
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Main Suspect in Syria’s Tadamon Massacre Arrested, Ministry Says
Residents gather in a street after Friday prayers to celebrate the arrest of Amjad Yousef, a key suspect in the 2013 Tadamon massacre, in Tadamon, Syria, April 24, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
Syria’s Interior Ministry said on Friday it had arrested the main suspect in the 2013 Tadamon massacre, one of the worst acts of violence attributed to the former government of Bashar al-Assad, in which 288 civilians were killed.
The ministry released footage of Amjad Yousef’s arrest in the Al-Ghab Plain area of Hama province in western Syria, near his hometown. Yousef had been hiding there since the overthrow of Assad at the end of 2024, a security source told Reuters.
US Special Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack welcomed the arrest in a post on X, calling it an important step towards accountability for atrocities committed during Syria’s war.
DOCUMENTING THE MASSACRE
Yousef, 40, a former member of military intelligence under Assad, was thrust into the spotlight in April 2022 when the UK’s Guardian newspaper published videos provided by two academics that they said showed him forcing blindfolded civilians to run towards a pit in the Tadamon neighborhood of southern Damascus before shooting them.
Annsar Shahoud, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam Holocaust and Genocide Center and one of the academics, spent four years documenting the massacre.
Posing as an online fangirl, Shahoud gained Yousef’s trust and ultimately obtained his confessions both on video and audio recording.
Reuters was unable to reach Yousef for comment as he has been taken into custody.
The massacre is one of the most egregious documented incidents of violence attributed to the Assad government during the 14-year bloody war that began in 2011.
After Assad’s fall at the end of 2024, civilians, media outlets and international organizations went to the site of the massacre to inspect it and interview witnesses. Locals refer to the site as “Amjad Yousef’s Pit.” It has been marked on Google Maps as “The Site of the Tadamon Massacre.”
Ahmed Adra, a Tadamon resident and a member of the neighborhood committee, said victims’ families had been celebrating in the streets since morning.
“We will take white roses and plant them at the site of the massacre and tell the victims that their memory is alive and that justice is being served,” he told Reuters.
Shahoud said she now felt safe with Yousef in custody, but added the path to justice in Syria was unclear and did not include all perpetrators.
“I feel safe now, despite the distance, because I always felt for years that this person was after me,” she told Reuters.
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Merz Floats Sanctions Relief for Iran Peace Deal, Other EU Leaders Cautious
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz speaks during a cabinet meeting at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Feb. 4, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Liesa Johannssen
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz suggested on Friday that the European Union could ease sanctions on Tehran as part of a comprehensive deal that would end the Iran war, but other EU leaders struck a more cautious note.
The 27-nation EU has imposed sanctions on Iran for years, including travel bans and asset freezes for senior officials and entities, in response to human rights violations, nuclear activities, and military support for Russia.
US officials have suggested a comprehensive deal covering Iran‘s nuclear and missile programs and the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz could bring a lasting end to the US-Israeli war with Tehran, beyond the current ceasefire.
After an EU summit in Cyprus, Merz said the bloc could gradually ease sanctions on Iran in the event that a comprehensive agreement was reached.
European leaders have been largely sidelined in the current Middle East conflict but some European officials see the bloc’s sanctions as a possible way for the EU to be involved in a diplomatic solution.
“The easing of sanctions can be part of a process,” Merz told reporters after the Nicosia summit.
“No one has objected to that,” he said of the summit deliberations. “It is, so to speak, part of the contribution we can make to advance this process and, hopefully, lead to a permanent ceasefire.”
But European Council President Antonio Costa, the chair of the summit, told a press conference after the end of the meeting: “It is too early to talk about relieving any kind of sanctions.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said sanctions relief could only come after clear evidence of fundamental changes of course from Iran.
“We believe that sanctions relief should be conditional on verification of de-escalation, particularly on progress on the international effort to contain its nuclear threat, and on a change to the repression of its own people,” she told the same press conference.