Holocaust Living memorial project

Produced by Fordham Law's Jewish Law Students Association

My maternal Grandmother, Margot, was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1934. She lived with her parents in a small apartment above her Grandfather's Kosher butcher shop, a staple in the Hamburg Jewish community. At just four-years-old Margot hid in the bathtub while Nazis raided and looted her family's home during Kristallnacht. Soon after, Margot and her mother, Hedwig, escaped on a train to Holland and eventually to New York where the next three generations of their family would build their lives. While in the Hamburg train station, four-year-old Margot slept on her mother's lap waiting for their train to Holland. A group of Nazi officers approached Margot and Hedwig asking for papers which would have revealed they were Jewish. By sheer luck, one of the officers told the others to "let the baby sleep" and they moved on without checking their papers. Margot and both her parents eventually made it to New York but the majority of their family was murdered in Auschwitz including Margot's grandfather Gerson Stoppleman, the Kosher butcher, seen with Margot here.

Nelly Gargano '23

My grandfather Bernie Silberfarb was born into a world that was in great turmoil as Hitler and Germany were emerging as a dire threat to the Jews and the entire world. Bernie was born in a shtetl called Sernik in what was then Poland (today Ukraine) in the year 1929. At 10 years old, Bernie was witness to much tragedy and horror, and his character was forged in the fire of the holocaust. After the Nazis murdered his father, Bernie escaped the ghetto and went into hiding in a nearby forest. Bernie lived in the forest for four years until the war ended. At the end of the war, Bernie emigrated to Cuba. Bernie was a successful businessman in Cuba but fled Cuba for the United States after Fidel Castro came to power. In the US, he met and married my grandmother Lea who was also born in Poland and emigrated to Israel after the war before eventually settling in the US.


Ruth Silberfarb '23

Pauline Schweitzer Schindler, my great-grandmother, was born in 1898 in Bohorodchany, Poland which later became Ukraine. Prior to WWII, she moved to Leipzig, Germany with her family. Once the war started, my great-grandmother was sent to America and eventually married and gave birth to my father's mother, my grandmother, Chana. The rest of my family was not as fortunate, all of my great-grandmother's immediate family members were sent to concentration camps, two of them being Buchenwald and Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Basic information about my family was lost along with their lives, for example, how many family members there were, their names, ages, addresses, professions, interests, and more. Yet, in 2012, my father received an email from a man in Israel named Yoav claiming to be our second cousin.

Alexandria Bell '23 and Avery Bell '25

My father expressed that this couldn't possibly be true as his grandmother's entire family perished at the hands of the Nazis in World War II. To my family's surprise, Yoav was right and was able to map out our family lineage through marriage records he located and detailed Nazi records taken about my family because of the simple fact that they were Jewish. It turned out that my great-grandmother's brother, Noah Schweitzer, had four children, Ida, Asher, Aharon, and Sofie. Asher and Aharon managed to escape to Yugoslavia by the end of 1940 then onto Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and finally, to Palestine/Israel where they got married and had two children each. One of those children is Yoav, the man who reached out to my dad. About a year later, our family was reunited, but most of the story of who our family was and what happened to them is still unknown.



My grandfather, Michael Zeiger, was born in Zborov, Ukraine. In the early 1940's, the Jews in Zborov were moved into ghettos, and then labor camps. My grandfather's neighbor, a gentile named Anton Suchinski, offered to hide my family in a cellar he dug underground for this very purpose. Anton was a modest man -- on the verge of poverty. Nonetheless, for nine months my family hid in this small, dark hole underground, surviving on scraps of potato peels or whatever Anton was able to provide. When they were finally liberated, they could hardly walk. They recovered in displaced persons camps, and ultimately started their news lives in the United States. My family spent years looking for Anton once they had set up roots in New Jersey. Finally, they were able to trace him down, and in 1974 he was honored at Yad Va Shem.

Talia Abed '24

Lucy Mandelstam was born Lucie Drachsler in Vienna, Austria on June 24, 1926. Her memoir—featured on her website—spans her childhood in Vienna, her life under the Nazi Regime in Vienna and in the Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Stutthof concentration camps; her long journey to Israel via Italy and Cyprus, and her life in Israel since 1948. Additional stories look back at past memories as well as at recent events, people, and places in her life.

Yael Mandelstem

Associate Librarian for Technical Services, Fordham Law

My grandfather Joseph Korin was born on April 1, 1925, in the town of Lvov, Poland. He was able to escape from the Nazis as they entered his town by hiding out in the woods until he began fighting in the Russian army. His entire extended family was killed other than one sister who survived and ended up in Israel where she still lives at the age of 91. After working on an Israeli cargo ship, my grandfather ultimately ended up in New York, where he met his wife, Claire, had 2 children, and started a successful business.

Amanda Rudolf '24

My grandmother, Ursula Kugelman, escaped from Nazi Germany with her parents in the year after Kristallnacht. My grandmother was sent on the kindertransport to Belgium at age 9, and her father was arrested and taken to Dachau. Her mother was able to get him out of Dachau through a letter to a friend in America, and the two of them smuggled themselves over the border to Belgium in the middle of the night, where they were reunited with their daughter, my grandmother. They obtained safe passage to the US just a few months before the Nazis marched

into Belgium.

Lauren Lieberman '24

This is my great-great-great grandmother, Maryam Iczig Mark. She was born in 1856 in Cluj, Transylvania in modern Romania- then under the Kingdom of Hungary within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Maryam married Aharon Gershon Mark of Lapus in 1877 and became the matriarch to the large Mark family, having seven sons and a daughter. The five sons who survived to adulthood would all later serve in WWI. Upon the defeat of the Central Powers, the region was given to Romania and the family fell on hard times, losing their farm. In the early 20s, two sons, Chaim Tzvi and Shmuel Mordechai, decided to leave for the United States with their wives and young children. They would be the only family to survive the war unscathed. In 1944, the family was taken to Auschwitz. Maryam, a great-grandmother was gassed upon arrival. She was 88.

Adam Mark '25

My grandfather, Michael Marder, was a holocaust survivor who survived 9 Nazi concentration camps and has since unfortunately passed at the age of 94.

Rebecca Goetz '25

When the United States entered World War II, my great grandfather, Dr. Moe Abraham Goldberg, was a practicing physician, married living in the Bronx with two young daughters, Ethel and Leila (my grandmother) and his wife Sylvia, pictured here. He enlisted as a medical doctor in the US army and was sent to Europe to tend to badly wounded soldiers. He later helped liberate small concentration camps, where he was on the front lines, and was profoundly impacted by what he witnessed, especially as a Jewish man. After the war, he was asked to stay in Europe to help run a Displaced Persons Camp, but he declined. He chose not to bring his daughters to Europe to know the horrors of the Holocaust. Sylvia Goldberg’s mother Taube Herzog’s family lived in Zablatov, Poland; they were all murdered. Members of her father Moses Herzog’s family also were murdered after escaping from Vienna to Paris. We do not know where these family members died, only that they could not be located after the war. Some of my great-great grandfather Moses Herzog’s relatives survived by escaping to the United States and Israel with his financial assistance.

Meredith Berger '24

Eli Fisher '26

My grandfather, Isaac, was born in Poland in 1938. At a young age, he and his parents, brother, and grandfather had to hide from the Nazis in the forest and escape on foot to Siberia, where they remained in freezing and starving conditions for years until the war was over. They eventually returned to Poland to find that most of their family and Jewish neighbors had been killed in the concentration camps. The Poles took their house and all of their property, and they had nowhere to go. Since no country would take the Jews, they had to remain in Poland. Antisemitism was just as bad as before the war and the Poles were disappointed that the Nazis didn't finish the job. Every Sunday, my grandfather had to stay indoors because the priests in the church would incite the local Polish boys to attack the Jews, and on Christmas and Easter he had to be extra careful to hide for a few days as the call to kill the Jews was even stronger. Eventually, they were allowed to enter Israel, where my grandfather quickly learned Hebrew and served in the IDF. He was finally home. He was in a country where he was safe. Yes, all the surrounding Arab countries wanted Israel destroyed, but there was finally a land where Jews could live free from persecution and hatred. He passed away two years ago, and his funeral was attended by his two children, nine grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

Julia Salomon, my paternal grandmother, was born in Pristina, Yugoslavia (modern day Kosovo) in the mid 1930s, where she lived in a house with her grandparents, parents, and 5 siblings. In 1941, after fleeing to Albania, all of the men in her family were taken to camps, except two of her brothers who were able to bribe guards to flee and joined the Partisan resistance in Yugoslavia. In 1944, Julia and the rest of her family were taken to Bergen Belsen concentration camp. In 1945 as Germany was on the verge of defeat, she was loaded along with 2500 other jews on a train headed for the Terenshinstad extermination camp, which after 15 days was intercepted and freed by the Russians. My grandmother was extremely lucky in that her parents and all of her siblings survived Bergen Belsen.

After meeting and marrying my grandfather Moshe, another Bergen Belsen survivor from Pristina, they emigrated to Venezuela, where my grandmother was the director of the Jewish pre-school in Caracas and taught multiple generations of Venezuelan Jews what it meant to be Jewish. My grandfather Moshe, established a successful carton/cardboard factory in Caracas, and unfortunately passed in 2007 at the age of 76.

Alex Cohen '25

My grandmother, Annamarie Sokoly, was on the path to Auschwitz with her mother (my great-grandmother) in 1944 . My great-grandmother hid a diamond in her coat to later give to a sympathetic Hungarian Solider in exchange for my grandmother's escape. While her mother went to Auschwitz, my grandmother hid in a pantry and later was sent to the ghettos. My great-grandmother became so frail in the camps that the Nazis used a German Shepard to attack her and ripped off the numbers on her wrist. Afterwards, my great-grandmother was thrown into a ditch because they could not document her number for the gas chambers. She woke up the next day and hid until her liberation days later. My great-grandmother lived until she was 91. My grandmother past away in 2021 at 90 years old.

My grandfather, Lazlo Sokoly, was sent to a labor camp in 1944. He was considered lucky because he was not sent to the Ipolysag ghettos like the rest of his family. His entire family was then moved to Auschwitz and sent to the gas chambers. He lost both of his parents and one of his sisters at the age of 17. His other sister survived Auschwitz and never removed the tattoo from her wrist. He passed away in 2011 at 84 years old.

After the Holocaust, my grandparents got married in Budapest, Hungary at the Dohany Synagogue. They moved to the United States during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.


More information about their story can be found at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1981/06/18/the-sokolys-tragic-triumph/6fe712cf-8696-46fb-bcba-81ed131928b6/

Jessica Chelst '25