Surviving the Camps and Rebuilding Life: The Story of a Young Jewish Girl from Suha
This testimony shares the life of a young Jewish girl from Suha, Poland, whose world changed overnight when the war began. She grew up in a warm, close family of six children, with a father who ran a barbershop and a mother who owned a small candy store. Their home was full of traditions, holidays, and the simple joys of childhood—friends, singing, and summers by the river.
Everything changed in 1941 when the Germans occupied the town. Jewish families were ordered to wear stars, restricted from walking certain streets, and stripped of their livelihoods. Her father was humiliated by being forced to serve German officers; soon after, all Jews were ordered to the schoolyard for selection. She was assigned to kitchen work. When she returned, her father and sister were gone—sent to Auschwitz in cattle cars. She never saw them again.
What followed was a brutal sequence of forced labor camps—Egelsberg, Rehmsdorf, and others—where she endured starvation, beatings, freezing temperatures, disease, and constant fear. She carried straw bundles, peeled rotten potatoes, scraped by on watery soup, slept in icy barracks, and suffered typhoid fever. At one point she survived by trading half of a cherished silver watch chain—her last connection to home—for potatoes and bread.
In early 1945, the guards fled as the Red Army approached. Too sick to walk, she remained in an abandoned German house, where Russian soldiers brought her food until she recovered enough to travel. Returning home, she found nothing left—no family, no furniture, no Jewish community.
But she survived. In Kraków she reunited with friends, found distant relatives, and reconnected with a man she had known before the war. They married, started a new life together, and eventually emigrated to the United States in 1949 with their infant son.
Her life after the war was marked by resilience—but also by the long, invisible scars of trauma. Persistent pain, anxiety, and psychological wounds required decades of medical care. Yet she rebuilt a family, raised children, and created a life far removed from the terror she endured.
She shares her story for one reason:
so the next generations will know the truth—because forgetting invites repetition.