Mania Friedman Perel — A Life Survived, A Warning to the World
Mania Friedman Perel describes her survival as a miracle. Born in Radom, Poland, she was a teenager when the Germans invaded in 1939 — the moment her ordinary life collapsed into starvation, forced labor, and the destruction of her entire family. She would ultimately endure eight concentration camps.
Her parents ran a bakery, and her home was full of relatives, neighbors, and warmth. All of that shattered when Jews were forced into the Radom Ghetto, stripped of rights, beaten, starved, and hunted. Mania’s family was deported to Treblinka in 1942 — murdered the same day they arrived. Mania was torn away during the selection and never saw them again.
Inside the ghetto and later the labor camps, Mania risked her life repeatedly. She protected Bella, her five-year-old niece, hiding her under bunks and inside baskets so guards wouldn’t find her. When Mania faced deportation to Majdanek, she pushed Bella through a fence to her teenage brother — hoping she might have a chance. Bella didn’t survive. Mania carried her memory for the rest of her life.
What followed were years of transports and torment: Majdanek, Płaszów, Auschwitz, Gundelsdorf, Ravensbrück, and others. She worked in freezing weather, endured beatings, marched until collapse, and survived on watery soup and scraps. During a death march in 1945, she hid in a forest for two days, barely conscious, until the Russian army liberated her on May 1, 1945.
When the war ended, Mania weighed almost nothing and had no surviving immediate family. She rebuilt her life slowly in displaced persons camps and later in the United States — marrying, raising children, and telling the story her mother urged her to share in a fevered vision: “You must survive so you can teach the world.”
Mania’s testimony ends with a plea: remember the victims, fight denial, defend Israel, and never allow hatred to rise unchecked. Her legacy — and Bella’s — depends on it.