Elia Stern
Haifa, Israel

Miriam (Masha) and Yeshayahu Brahmson left Poland in the mid-1930s and emigrated to Mandatory Palestine with their three young children, Haim, Rivka, and Rachel. During World War II many of their Jewish relatives who stayed in Poland were murdered.

In the years that followed, Miriam and Yeshayahu raised their children in Israel and spoke little of their devastating loss. On occasion, the discovery of a surviving relative was cause for great excitement. The teapot they brought with them was eventually passed down to their granddaughter Elia. It is still used on special occasions and serves as a reminder of the life left behind and the gap in the family history.

Allen and Susan Lebovitz
Prairie Village, Kansas

Born in August 1926 to Hannah and Joseph Stern in Budapest, Hungary, Kate was only a teen when Hungary signed the Tripartite Pact in 1940. As a result, Hungarian Jews were subjected to a series of anti-Jewish laws, that imposed limits on Jewish participation in Hungary's public and economic spheres. Kate’s father and two brothers were among the murdered during the Nazi occupation.

Kate met and wed Eugene Lebovitz in the Budapest Ghetto after he had already worked as a forced laborer, sewing uniforms for the Nazis. When they could, the couple helped smuggle sick people out of the ghetto. Later, Kate came under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg and received a Swedish passport. 

After her liberation in Budapest, Kate was reunited with Eugene, who had been liberated from Mauthausen. The two eventually made their way to Italy and then to the United States. Speaking some Yiddish and a bit of Italian, Eugene managed to build his way up in the garment industry. Kate learned English by watching television. The couple built their life in Kansas City and raised a family together. For many years Kate and Eugene spoke little of their survival story, but the fiftieth anniversary of their emigration to the United States was a big celebration.

Regina Atabe
France

Millions of children were displaced during World War II as a result of the persecution by the Nazis and their collaborators. Some of the children were photographed by relief agencies in an effort to locate their families or find them new homes. Regina’s photograph appeared in one of the associated collections. No further information is available about her as of yet.

On the night of September 4, 1939, Paul and Edwina left Warsaw with Edwina’s parents, Sara and Joseph Patron. Leaving quickly, they took little with them and drove in Paul’s car toward Hungary. Without proper paperwork, Edwina’s parents decided not to cross the border. They did not know that at the time, thousands of people were fleeing Poland, so all visas had been invalidated. Crossing without the visa would have made little difference. Paul and Edwina never saw Sara and Joseph again.

The couple continued on to Budapest and eventually reached London in early 1940. In November of that year they emigrated with Samuel and his wife to Canada and settled in Vancouver, British Columbia.

David and Miriam Ullmann
Haifa, Israel

The Ullmann family lived in Würzburg, Germany, prior to World War II. Simon and Perla had five children together: Julius; Henny and her twin brother, Yoni; Teodor, and Martha. Simon also had three daughters from a previous marriage.

By the time the war broke out, Simon and Perla’s children as well as their half sister Gita had emigrated to Mandatory Palestine. Henny went back to Germany in 1939 and did not survive after being deported to Riga. The two half sisters from Simon’s first marriage were murdered as well.

Of all their relatives, only a distant aunt survived. In 1947 Yaakov and Yitzhak embarked on the ship Atzmaut en route to Mandatory Palestine. The British intercepted the ship and sent the refugees to an internment camp in Cyprus. In January 1949 the brothers finally managed to reach Israel, where they were sent to the kibbutz Kfar Giladi. They were drafted into the Israel Defense Forces together even though Yaakov was only seventeen years old. After his military service, Yaakov became a dentist with the encouragement of a woman who fostered him and his brother. He married Marta and raised three sons in Haifa, Israel.

Yael Roth
Mazkeret Batya, Israel

In 1933 Buko and Ida Ben Mayor wed in Bulgaria. During the war, Buko joined the partisan resistance while Ida was sent to a concentration camp. After the war, the two were reunited by the Red Cross and made their way to Mandatory Palestine.

David and Ofra Bloch
New York, New York

Ajzyk Bloch worried about the Nazi occupation and decided to flee Warsaw, Poland, toward the Soviet Union with his wife, Riva Bloch, and their two-year-old son, David. After crossing the border into the Soviet Union, they were immediately sent to Siberia. Their extended family who stayed behind were murdered during the war.  

The camp they were sent to had been previously set up as a gulag forced labor camp. The location was so remote, bare, and cold that no fences were needed to prevent prisoners from escaping. After two years at the camp, the Polish refugees were allowed to leave and the family made its way through the hunger-stricken Soviet Union in search of work.

When David was about six years old, the three became gravely ill with typhoid fever. David recalls fetching the village doctor to save his parents. There was no medicine or food available, but the doctor saved Ajzyk and Riva. He refused to accept Ajzyk and Riva’s last asset, a gold Doxa watch, which Riva offered as payment. 

After the war, the family returned to Warsaw. Their street had been leveled during the bombing of the city. In 1957, David left for Israel. He later attended university in Holland and eventually made his way to his permanent residence in New York City, where he married Ofra and raised two sons with her. The couple explore their family memories and narratives through sculpture, painting, and filmmaking.

Ben Stern
Haifa, Israel

Ben’s paternal grandmother, Manya (May), was born in Pinsk, Russia, around 1885. After earning a teaching certificate, she worked as a teacher in a small village. At the time, repeated pogroms ignited by Cossacks targeted local Jews. Being the only teacher in the village, Manya and her family were hidden several times by the mother of one of her non-Jewish students in her basement.

After the failure of the 1905 revolution, Jews were increasingly persecuted and many Jewish organizational activities were outlawed. Manya and her family decided to flee Russia, traveling under difficult conditions by boat to the United States. In 1909 they settled in Philadelphia, where Manya met her husband, Alexander (Sasha) Stern. Alexander had escaped a gulag a few years earlier after being arrested in a demonstration against the czar. 

The couple eventually settled in New York, where Manya worked in the garment industry and Alexander worked as a traveling salesman. They had three sons, William, Philip (Phil) and Victor (Ben’s father). At some point, Alexander left the family and moved to the West Coast. His sons never forgave him for leaving their mother.

Susan and Michael Richter
New York, New York

Susan Richter’s Oma and Opa (“grandmother” and “grandfather” in German) were Hedwig and Leon Liebenstein. Prior to World War II, they lived in Mainz, Germany, where the Jewish community experienced prosperity alongside persecution for nearly a millennium. They left Mainz on August 7, 1940, fortunate enough to have the means and paperwork to escape. Their journey took them by air to Moscow, on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Manchuria, then through Korea, on boat to Japan, and eventually to North America, arriving in Seattle on September 11, 1940. They carried a bit more than forty pounds each, including clothing, silver cutlery, and a few photographs.

Their daughter, Ruth, later joined them in the United States. She married Fred Lomnitz in 1945, and Susan was born a few years later.

Leah and Gil Elisha
Hadar Am, Israel

Lili Grunwald (Ganzel) and her sisters, Shoshana and Rene, were urged by their mother to have their photograph taken days before the family was forced into a ghetto in Slovakia. They did not have a chance to pick up the photo and were soon sent to Auschwitz. Both Shoshana and Rene were murdered in the gas chambers on the day they arrived—June 14, 1944.

After the war, Lili returned to her hometown in search of relatives. Her home had been looted and of forty family members, only two cousins survived. By chance, Lili walked by the photographer’s store and saw the photograph they had left behind displayed in the storefront. It was the only photograph she had of anyone in her family.

Lili married in Slovakia after the war and immigrated to Israel in 1949 with her husband, Israel Ganzel, and son, Baruch. Her daughter, Leah, was born later, in Israel. For many years Lili refrained from talking about the past.

Bella and Sasson Tzidkiyahu
Jerusalem, Israel

Bella’s mother, Shoshana Rabinovic (Rossa Zif), was born in 1923 in the village of Loknik near Kovno (currently Louke, near Kaunas, Lithuania). When the Nazis invaded that area she escaped with her younger sister, Dorra, to the Telz ghetto and then to the countryside. To survive, she hid in the forests and worked for farmers in that region. Shoshana longed for liberation, but when she finally saw the first Soviet soldier arrive in 1944, she started crying, realizing that the war might be over but her family was gone. Over the next few months she reunited with her sister and found a surviving aunt. 

The three made their way to western Germany, then southern France, seeking a way to get to Israel. On this journey, she met her husband, Yitzhak, who was the sole survivor of his family. They eventually made it to Israel and built their home in the village of Hadar Am.

Elinore Noyes and Tjalda Nauta
Kansas City, Missouri

Walle and Ellie Nauta, the Dutch great-grandparents of Elinore Noyes, harbored a teenage Jewish girl under the guise of a live-in nanny for their newborn daughter, Tjalda. The Jewish girl, Dina Dasberg Angress, survived the war and later immigrated to the United States, where she started a family, worked as a social worker and later adopted a child herself.

The war and that dangerous decision changed the lives of both families and affected the narratives of the following generations. Elinore writes:

“My grandmother, Tjalda, has mixed memories of this time: of fear, bombings, and hunger, yet also of normality, laughter, and happiness. She remembers playing outside on sunny days while she also remembers the bombing of their neighbor’s house. Even during wartime, she and her family, including Dina, maintained familiar everyday routines. Yet the war impacted her long beyond its end in 1945. The experience of war shaped her directly for the time that she lived through it, but more so in the indirect effect that it had upon her through the experience of her parents, relatives, and Dina.”

Matilda and Martin Rosenberg
Fairway, Kansas

Matilda’s mother, Alegre (Kastro) Tevet, recalls a happy childhood in Drama, Greece. Her parents, Samuel and Sarah, had seven children. Alegre attended the Alliance Jewish School in Drama, where she learned Greek, French, and Hebrew. During the Italian and German occupation of Greece, many anti-Jewish restrictions were imposed, and the family was moved to the Salonika ghetto. In March 1943, Alegre was deported with her family to Auschwitz-Birkenau, spending nearly a week on the train. Her parents, three brothers, and two sisters were murdered during the war. After her liberation at Bergen-Belsen, Alegre lived in Switzerland and Belgium before returning to Greece.

In 1940, Matilda’s father, Albert (Abraham) Tevet, took his sister, Esther, from Greece to Bulgaria to meet her future husband, Sammy. Bulgaria was considered safer than Greece at the time and many Jews survived by fleeing there. Greece was being invaded by the Nazis so Abraham returned home to help his family. His return was detrimental, as he too was captured and deported. He managed to survive three years in concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Dachau, and several others. Esther was the only of his siblings who survived the war.

Albert and Alegre met when they each returned to Greece (they were both from Drama). They married in 1951 but experienced continual anti-Semitism and felt isolated, being one of only five Jewish families remaining in their town. They were haunted by memories and decided to take an opportunity to secure a visa to the United States, where they could rebuild their lives.

Steve Sherry
Kansas City, Missouri

Steve was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1938 to Otto and Lili Serebrenik. His maternal grandfather owned a large retail business, Bruder Felberbaum, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938). That same day, Steve’s uncle was arrested and temporarily imprisoned in Dachau. As a result of the increasing pressure and persecution, the family sought a way to flee Austria. Otto contacted an American couple he had met by chance several years earlier when they had happened upon his store and come inside to inquire about the family, as they shared the same uncommon surname. (There turned out to be no family connection). Although unrelated, the American couple agreed to sponsor Otto’s family’s application for immigration. Otto, Lili, and Steve fled Austria in January 1939. They sailed on board the RMS Aquitania from Cherbourg, France, to New York City. Otto's mother, Regina, remained in Austria and later perished on the way to a concentration camp. 

Without the ability to transfer their assets but having the means to ship some belongings, Otto’s family shipped a crate with Bauhaus furniture and other items, which they treasured for many years.

Gustave Eisenmann

As shared by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, Leawood, Kansas

Born in 1926 to an affluent, educated, Orthodox Jewish family, Gustave participated in both German and Jewish culture. He frequented the opera, theater, and museums, while also attending a Jewish day school and a large synagogue. When Hitler came to power, the Jewish community was slowly isolated to the point where Gustave's father could no longer make a living. Luckily, a cousin in Kansas City arranged for affidavits that allowed the whole family to come to Kansas City in 1938, just before Kristallnacht. Gustave went on to be one of the first Jewish residents at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in hematology.

Isak Federman

As shared by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, Leawood, Kansas

Isak's mother raised four children after their father died, tailoring shirts to support her family. At seventeen, while on his way to get sugar and butter for his mother, Isak was seized by Nazi soldiers and never saw his family again. For the next five years he passed through numerous concentration camps, narrowly surviving through good luck and the kindness of others. When Isak was finally liberated at the end of the war, he weighed eighty pounds. 

In 1945, at the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp, Isak met his future wife, Ann Warshawski. The couple made their way to Kansas City in 1946. In 1993, with his friend Jack Mandelbaum, Isak founded the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education.

Rita Sudhalter
Overland Park, Kansas

The young woman smiling as she holds a large bouquet is Rita's mother, Rachel (Rose) Leah Zysman Murawiec (Murra). During the war, Rose witnessed the deaths of most of her family members, including her parents and her two brothers. Against the odds, she managed to survive the Międzyrzec ghetto as well as the Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Most of her extended family did not survive either. 

After the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, Rose met Natan (Nathan) Murawiec (Murra) in the displaced persons camp. Natan was the sole survivor of his family and had been involved in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. By March 1946 the two had wed while still displaced in Germany. In 1949 they managed to immigrate to the United States, where they settled and raised three children, Steven, Janet Murra Bloom, and Rita Murra Sudhalter. Rita and Janet remember that although they grew up without grandparents or extended family, their parents' friends and fellow survivors were like surrogate relatives to them.

Rose eventually became active and lectured about her experience as a survivor. Natan, however, could never bring himself to speak publicly about the atrocities he had witnessed.

Sonia Warshawski and Regina and Bill Kort
Leawood, Kansas

Regina’s mother, Sonia Warshawski, grew up in Międzyrzec, Poland. The town was predominantly Jewish and the community supported an orphanage, a home for the elderly, youth organizations, Hebrew schools, and a private secondary school. Sonia’s parents, Moishe and Rivka Grynsztejn, owned a trade business that manufactured outerwear. Sonia’s grandmother owned a popular restaurant and inn. On Thursdays, large crowds would fill the restaurant when farmers came to the market. Artists who stayed at the inn would often gift the Grynsztejn family free tickets to the Yiddish theater.

During the war, Międzyrzec had changed hands between Russian and German control. As the Nazis neared, Sonia’s father urged her mother to move east, but she could not bear to leave her home. In 1942 the family was moved into the ghetto and Sonia was sent to work as a forced laborer. When the ghetto was liquidated in 1943, she and her mother were deported to the Majdanek death camp, where her mother was murdered. Sonia was deported again to Auschwitz-Birkenau and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she was eventually liberated by the British.

In the chaos preceding the liberation, Sonia was shot in the chest. She recovered at the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp, where she met her future husband, John Warshawski. The couple married in 1946 and a year later, made their way to Kansas City. 

Sonia is one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors in Kansas City and has given many public talks about her wartime experience. Her compelling story and outreach efforts were documented in the 2016 documentary Big Sonia.

Irene Starr
Mission, Kansas

Irene’s father, Sally (Norman) Stiefel, was born in Birklar, Germany, in 1900. He was the fourth youngest of at least eighteen siblings, eight of whom served in the German army during World War I. In the 1920s and 1930s, seven of the siblings emigrated from Germany. Those who stayed in Germany did not survive World War II. Prior to the war, Sally worked briefly as a salesperson, and then as a manager. As the Nazis gained power, his Jewish employer was forced to sell his company, and more restrictions were placed on the remaining Jewish employees who were nevertheless dismissed in the summer of 1936.

In July 1938, Sally married Ruth, of Duisburg, Germany. On Kristallnacht, November 9 to 10, 1938, Sally was arrested and taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, while rioters destroyed hundreds of synagogues and businesses throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Appealing to German and American officials, Ruth presented approved immigration papers and travel tickets to the United States, in the hopes that her husband would be released. Sally was fortunately let go five weeks later, possibly due to his former service in the German army. The couple left Hamburg, Germany, for New York City on March 16, 1939, and settled in Kansas City in April 1939.

Irene’s parents spoke little of their experience in Germany. Upon their death, Irene and her brother, Richard, found many old documents, including handwritten correspondence, receipts, photos, Nazi propaganda, and immigration papers, as well as the reparations application her father submitted in from the late 1950s, all of which assisted them in their attempt to fill in the blanks.

Miriam and Daniel Scharf
Prairie Village, Kansas

Miriam’s grandmother, Sabina Schlanger Mandelberger, was born in Meilz, Poland, the fifteenth of sixteen children. In the early 1920s, Sabina was sent to attend school in Berlin and lived with relatives there. Prior to World War II, she and her husband had three sons and owned a tannery and leather store in Krakow, Poland. They lived a life she described as comfortable and happy. 

Following the 1939 invasion of Poland, Sabina was separated from her family. She was placed first in the Krakow ghetto, then in a series of camps including Plashov, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. Sabina was very ill when she was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in 1945. She was sent to Sweden for medical care due to the efforts of Count Bernadotte of Sweden. In Sweden she was reunited with her older two sons, Emil and Henry. Her younger son Simon and her husband Zelig died during the war.  

In 1949, Sabina immigrated to the United States. Her surviving sons and their families soon followed. 

Carlota (Lotti) Halpern
Kansas City, Missouri

Lotti’s grandfather, Bernard (Beno) Katzenell, was a soldier during World War I and married Cecilia (Cilly) in the 1920s. In 1931 their daughter, Dina, was born in Munich, where Beno worked for a relative. In 1935 one of Beno’s uncles was arrested by the gestapo as a form of extortion orchestrated by his estranged Christian wife. Beno and Cilly fled Germany to Austria with their two children, losing all of their property and belongings in the process. 

After working at a factory in Austria for three years, in 1938 the family secured a visa to Argentina. In Buenos Aires, the couple, who had been used to a higher standard of living, now worked odd, laborious jobs to make ends meet as immigrants. At home they spoke German and occasionally ate traditional Apfelkuchen, but they never wanted to return to Germany.  

In 1966, due to the political unrest in Argentina, Dina and her family immigrated to the United States through Miami. Lotti, Dina’s daughter, was a preteen at the time.

Jo Kamm and Marga Hirsch
Kansas City, Missouri and New York City, New York

Olga Hirsch and Max Strauss were an upper-class, educated, Jewish couple who lived in Germany prior to World War II. Born in Nürnberg in 1884, Olga lost her father at age eleven. Her uncle took her in and treated her as his own, developing her interest in spelunking and archaeology. 

In her late twenties, Olga married Max Strauss, an ambidextrous orthopedic surgeon and widower. Max served as a medical officer in the German army in World War I and studied with Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, becoming one of the first to use x-rays for diagnosis. The couple had a daughter together, Helene (Leni) Luise Marie Strauss. In the mid-1930s, the Strauss family realized that they needed to leave Germany. By then, Olga’s younger sister, Aennie Hirsch Elkan, had already immigrated with her husband to England. Olga and Max even explored the possibility of immigrating to Mandatory Palestine, but Olga had cancer, and they feared that she would not get adequate medical care there.

In June 1935, Leni was fourteen years old when her photo was taken during the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. The Strauss family was not observant, but at the time Leni was attending a Jewish school in Fürth, Germany. Perhaps in keeping with the traditions of Shavuot, Leni wore a white dress and a necklace with the Star of David. Later that year, Olga passed away.

In 1938 Leni fled Germany with her father and his new wife, Alice Kocherthaler. Leni’s older half sister, Elisabeth Strauss, had already left for Mandatory Palestine where she married and lived in Haifa for the rest of her life. The family was not allowed to take substantial assets with them but they managed to ship out personal items, including photographic materials. Olga had been an avid photographer and some of the images in the personal archive are attributed to her.