Sonia Lipowicz

The Museum’s Behind Every Name a Story project gives voice to the experiences of survivors during the Holocaust.

It did not matter if you were rich, educated, apolitical, or completely unaffiliated with religion — if you were a Jew in Poland in 1939, there was a 2 percent chance you would survive the Holocaust and live past 1945.

Ever since I can remember, I knew I came from one of these “survivor families.” I didn’t ask many questions about it growing up. My classmates at my Jewish day school knew about the Holocaust too, of course. But I didn’t realize until later in life that they "knew" about the Holocaust, while I felt it. Growing up, I never had "American grandparents" that picked me up from school or showed me deep affection. As I grew older, I began to realize that the absence of doting grandparents in my life was not an oversight, but rather the result of a painful history I had yet to fully comprehend.

I have spent the past year discovering my family’s story and I intend to tell it for as long as I can so that it may never be forgotten.I am the grandson of Sarah, the sole survivor of a family of eight victims of cold-blooded Nazi murder. I do not remember my grandmother, but my Hebrew name was given in honor of her youngest brother, Yakov, who was one of her five siblings murdered at Treblinka extermination camp.

Only three members of my grandmother’s 100-person extended family are known to have survived the Holocaust. My great-grandmother, Hadassah, came from a family of nine siblings. Eight of these siblings and their respective children shared that same Treblinka fate. I do not have a “family history” other than the Holocaust.

Chmielnik

Sonia “Sarah” Lipowicz was born on July 10, 1923, in Chmielnik, a small shtetl in southeastern Poland. Chmielnik, first settled by Jews in the 16^th century, was a good place for our people. Sarah was the third of seven children born to Avrum Lipowicz and Hadassah Berlin, who ran a flour mill together and lived a typical Hasidic family life.

Sam Berlin, one of Hadassah’s eight siblings, emigrated to the United States in 1910 in search of a better life amidst rising antisemitism and economic hardship. My grandmother’s family were preparing to follow Sam; they even had new clothing made for the trip. But Hadassah did not want to leave behind her elderly parents, Elya and Baila Gitla, and decided to stay. When the sadistic signs of Nazism and its consequences became more apparent, Sam arranged with a rabbi to send the family some cash to help bribe officials to secure immigration papers. The rabbi kept the money. After 1945, Sam was the only one of the nine siblings alive.

In September 1939, the once vibrant main square of Chmielnik fell silent. Jewish children stopped attending school, Jewish merchants and traders ceased visiting villages, and workshop owners were forced to shut down. Residents heard whispers of machine guns and the sounds of German planes overhead. At 4:30 pm on September 4, 1939, the German army entered Chmielnik with tanks. Innocent Jewish bystanders were ruthlessly murdered and Jewish shops were looted.Chmielnik turned into a Jewish ghetto and my family went into hiding.

My grandmother’s eldest sister, Chana, tried to escape to Warsaw, clinging to a glimmer of hope that perhaps, Jews could find sanctuary there. She was never seen again. The majority of Warsaw’s Jews ended up at Treblinka.No matter the desperate strategies Jews used to evade Nazi persecution, their destiny, more often than not, found a gruesome ending in the gas chambers.

The deportations from Chmielnik began in the fall of 1942. On October 1, 1942, 1,000 able-bodied Jews were ordered to be deported to a forced labor camp in Skarzysko-Kamienna. Hadassah urged my grandmother and her brother Meir, who were selected, to comply with the deportation order. They did not know where they were going, but Hadassah knew the Nazis would kill them if they defied their commands.

Five days later, at five o’clock in the morning on October 6, 1942, the sound of whistles, barking dogs, and gunshots filled the air as Nazis forced all Jewish villagers to gather at the market square. Families tried to stay together as they were marched, surrounded by heavily armed soldiers ready to enforce the orders of the commanding local SS officer Hauptman Majer. In complete silence, all Jews proceeded to the town square. Upon arrival, they were ordered to relinquish their gold and silver valuables. Shortly thereafter, screaming erupted. Approximately 200 Jews were abruptly shot and killed. Amidst the chaos, some of my uncles and aunts were forced into a building in the main square. The building was then set on fire, leaving them all to burn to death in the flames as they tried to escape. The murder of Fiszel Berlin is remembered in Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names today.

As the remaining crowd erupted in panic and despair, soldiers with whips and dogs forced my great-grandparents, and remaining uncles, aunts, and cousins onto waiting carts.Nazi extermination camp protocol dictated that those going to their death should be deceived until the end. The horrors of Treblinka awaited my family, but they were unaware of this at the time. The conditions in the cars were horrific, with no food, water, or sanitation, and families separated in the process. These were not trains designed for human beings, they were built to transport cattle and livestock. Many died on the journey due to suffocation, dehydration, or exhaustion.

On this day, approximately 8,000 of Chmeilnik’s Jews were shipped to Treblinka. 70 Jews were selected to clean up the town following the deportation. While awaiting instructions, the Germans forced the remaining Jews to sing Jewish songs. At first, they remained silent, contemplating the cruelty of such a demand. However, when one of the Germans shouted, "Sing, Jews!", one woman began to sing Hatikvah, the national anthem of the Jewish people. Soon, everyone joined in, their voices rising together.

Treblinka

The Treblinka extermination camp was in operation from July 1942 to October 1943 and was designed exclusively for the extermination of Jews at industrial scale during the Holocaust. Treblinka was not a good place for our people.

My grandmother’s parents Hadassah (42) and Avrum (47) were deported there, alongside her siblings Shimon (14), Yakov (10), and Bela (7), as well as Hadassah's father Elya (84), at least three of her siblings, and their respective families. My grandmother’s remaining siblings, Chana (22) and Meir (17), followed at some point after. Hearing my grandmother recount parts of this story in a video recording from 1995, almost 50 years afterwards, is some of the most painful footage I’ve ever watched. It’s also the only footage I have of her.

I’ll never forget the gut-wrenching pain in my grandfather’s voice the sole time he recounted the fate of my grandmother’s family: “When they got to Treblinka, they were killed that same day. No one got out alive.”

Unlike Auschwitz, there were very few survivors of Treblinka. This is because it was not a concentration camp. There was no prisoner selection. There was nothing to do at Treblinka but arrive and be murdered. When the trains arrived at the camp, my grandmother’s parents and siblings were forced to immediately disembark and strip naked. They were then herded into gas chambers, where they dropped dead from carbon monoxide poisoning within a few seconds. Their bodies were then burned in open-air pits, and any remaining bones were crushed and scattered. I imagine the Nazis referred to this as maximum operating efficiency.

My grandmother fondly remembered her youngest sister, Bela, who had beautiful blond hair. She was seven when she was deported to Treblinka and murdered that same day. My grandmother frequently told my grandfather how smart her brothers were. “They would have grown up to become doctors and businessmen for sure.” I’ll never forget their names: Meir, Shimon, and Yakov. My grandmother was 19 years old and the only one left of her family.

870,000 Jews were murdered at Treblinka. Just 70 brave souls survived after 700 inmates staged an uprising against the guards. Treblinka was such a well-oiled death factory that only 30 SS members were required to operate the camp as the gas chambers could kill up to 2,000 people at once.

Forced Labor

My grandmother and her brother Meir were sent to Skarzysko-Kamienna, a forced labor camp in Poland. Men and women were immediately separated, but during their first week there, Meir spotted Sarah through a fence. He came up to her and started crying. Shortly thereafter, he was deported to another camp and vanished off the face of the Earth.

“I never saw him again for the rest of my life.”

Skarzysko-Kamienna was operated by a Germany corporation called HASAG. During World War II, HASAG transformed into the primary arms supplier for the Nazis, with a plethora of factories scattered across German-occupied Europe. As a result, HASAG expanded to incorporate thousands of forced laborers from concentration camps and ghettos in Poland, becoming the third-largest user of forced labor in Europe. By 1942, the company predominantly employed Jewish forced laborers, with their wages paid directly to the SS.

The Skarzysko-Kamienna camp frequently conducted selections — a grim lottery where the chosen prisoners were executed by the factory police. On one occasion, having shot a group of sickly prisoners in a nearby forest, some guards ordered those selected as grave diggers to grab a body and dance around the pit they had dug while singing in Yiddish. They were all made to throw the bodies into the pit in unison when a signal was given. Such perverted scenes of torture were a part of daily life at the camp.

In 1943, Sarah was relocated to HASAG’s forced labor camp in Częstochowa, the same camp my grandfather and her future husband, Israel Wolf Rotman, was imprisoned at. Częstochowa was liberated by the Russians in January 1945 and Sarah found herself as one of the few survivors of the 1942 Chmielnik deportation.

After liberation, Sarah and a group of girls decided to return home. Unlike today, there was no social media, television, or internet to obtain information. They had to go there to find out what happened to their families. Upon their arrival, they found it eerily empty — no familiar faces, no loved ones to welcome them home. The journey back to Chmielnik, which was supposed to be a homecoming, instead revealed the chilling reality of the Holocaust's devastation. There was only one man that came back to Chmielnik. He told Sarah, “I saw my whole family go to the gas chambers at Treblinka. I was selected for forced labor and survived the uprising. Don’t wait. Nobody is going to come back.”

No one came back. Sarah was the sole survivor of her family of nine. No brothers or sisters. A “lucky one.”

Survivors

While searching for housing, my grandmother knocked on the door of an upscale flat that was occupied by an SS officer during the war. Another survivor that lost his whole family opened the door. My grandfather Wolf invited my grandmother in.

After surviving the horrors of the camps, my grandparents longed for a new beginning, a place where they could live as Jews without the threat of persecution. My grandfather wanted to join his brother in Israel, the ancestral homeland of our people and a country we could finally call our own. My grandmother wanted to move to Canada, where some of her father’s family had emigrated to before the Holocaust. In 1947, Canada passed the Displaced Persons Act, which allowed for the entry of 10,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution. The visa arrived and my grandparents and aunt moved to North America.

While my grandparents experienced much fortune in Canada, tragedy struck again in 1997. My grandmother was diagnosed with liver cancer when she was 74 years old and died a few months later. I do not remember her, but I have been told my Bubby was exceptionally sharp and responsible for a lot of my grandparents’ success. But like many survivors, there was so much pain.

How I wish I knew you, Bubby. I hope I’ve made you proud by sharing our story with the world.

Written by Cole Rotman, grandson of Sarah Lipowicz Rotman (z”l), in June 2023 in New York City