Susan was born an only child to a conservative Jewish family in Roznava, Slovakia. Her mother and father owned a dry-goods store. Susan was thirteen years old when the war began. News of the evils of the concentration camps reached Roznava and Susan’s father decided to take his family out of Slovakia as fast as possible. Her father had a brother in the United States that would assist her family in receiving Visas. They sailed into New York City on the S.S. Washington on August 3, 1939.
Susan was placed into an all female public school. Her English was very poor and her peers ridiculed her because she was an immigrant. She was an outstanding student and furthered her education at Brooklyn College. She moved to Washington, DC in 1948 when a close college friend found her a job in the US Army Map Service; she read documents in Hungarian and summarized them into English. She met her husband in the Service and was later married in 1950. Susan was a retired elementary school art teacher.
As a museum volunteer, she gave tours of the Permanent Exhibition to groups from the program Bringing the Lessons Home: Holocaust Education in the Community.
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Listen to or read Holocaust survivors’ experiences, told in their own words through oral histories, written testimony, and public programs.