RelatioNet Katza
Students:
Gabby and Dan Goldstein
Survivor:
Soffia Aptekar
Previous Family Name: Jonisz
Father's Name: Faivel
Mother's Name: Czarna
Brother's Name: Ijo
Sister's Name: Tusha
Date of Birth: 20/9/1915
Country of Birth: Poland
City of Birth: Warsaw
Sofia's
Story
Soffia was born in Warsaw on September 20th1915
and was the eldest sister of Ijo and Tusha. From ages 6 to 18, she attended a private Jewish school.
In 1933, after she graduated from high school,
she started studying psychology. But the attitude towards the Jewish people
had changed. There were acts of violence committed against Jews at the University of Warsaw. This
situation and the difficult economic conditions drove Soffia to leave her
studies and start working in her father's wholesale business.
On September 1st 1939 Germany invaded
Poland. Immediately after that the Red army ordered all able bodied Pole's to
join the army. Following that order, all men in Soffia's family enrolled in the
army- her father, her husband Zigmond (the two got married on April 7th 1938),
her brother Ijo and her uncle.The conditions in Warsaw got worse since the
bombing of Warsaw increased. The family decided to move to the basement of Soffia's father's business.
Since the soldiers in the family were serving in
Bialystok, Soffia's mother thought that it would be better for Soffia to join
the men there. She waited for the right time. One day a messenger, who looked and spoke German, brought her a letter from her father.
Her mother decided to send Soffia to her
father with the messenger. Soffia, dressed as a
village girl,walked with the messenger passing German military checkpoints. At night
they slept in the villages. After walking a great distance they arrived in
Bialystok where her father and uncle were. Two days later, Soffia went to
Krzemieniec to meet her husband and
brother.
After they met, they drove to Werba, where
they lived for a while during which time Zigmond worked paving roads. After that
they moved to Radziviluf where Zigmond continued working on the roads and they
lived as poor refugees. Each time
Zigmond finished paving a part of the road they moved with all the other
workers to a different place. The next village was Poswoloczysk.
On June 1st 1939, the war between Russia
and Germany broke out, thus Soffia and Zigmond decided to move to inner Russia.
They took the first train not knowing where they are going and found
themselves in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.
Hundreds of refugees had come to Toshkent due to the war. Among them Soffia found her cousin Nathan Yonish and a couple of friends Adam and Franka
Stern. All five of them decided to move to Kazakhstan since they had heard that the
living conditions were better there. When they arrived they decided to settle
in an agricultural cooperative farm (known as a Kolkhoz) near Dzambul. At a
later stage, Soffia and her husband were the only ones to stay there.
Ijo died in combat in the Polish army in March 1945. Soffia and her husband
lived out most of the war in Kazakhstan.
In 1945, at the end of the war during her
first month of pregnancy, Soffia and Zigmond decided to take a train back to
Warsaw. They didn't know what to expect. Warsaw was completely ruined. The Red Army
had imposed a curfew. The situation in Poland was terrible, there were pogroms and
Jews were killed. Soffia discovered that her mother had died of typus in the
Ghetto and that her father and sister had been sent to Bergen Belzen
concentration camp.
From Warsaw Soffia and Zigmond continued
their journey and arrived at a transit camp in Austria called Kleinmunchen, in
the American Zone where they stayed for a few months.
When
Soffia was seven months pregnant the camp officials ordered the refugees to
move to Italy in order to bring them closer to Palestine. On the journey from Austria
to Italy, they walked thousands of miles going through Innsbruck and Milano .
In
1946, they arrived at the Scuola Cadorna Refugee Camp. Soffia had her newborn
baby girl, Celina, two months later. Zigmond managed and taught road construction at the Ort professional school there enabling them to move out of the camp and rent a small apartment.
At the same time, two of Zigmond's aunts,
living in Argentina, invited Soffia and Zigmond to join them there. Although Argentina did not allow Jews into the country to organize the required papers - the Joint- a Jewish aid society, succeeded in doing that for
them.
In 1948, they arrived in Argentina and settled into an apartment. Zigmond started
working in an Austrian Jewish office as an independent engineer. Celina went to school and to high school.
In the early 1960's, there was a wave of Anti-Semitism in Argentina following
the capture of Eichmann so Soffia and Zigmond decided to move to
Israel. They purchased an apartment in Ramat Gan and made Alia.
But the journey to Israel wasn’t easy. They left
Buenos Aires on a ship called Giulio Cesare on January 20, 1963 and arrived on
Israeli shores one month afterwards. Once in Israel, they met Soffia's surviving
cousins who had come to Israel both before and after the war.
Finally, Soffia and Zigmond felt they were
home!
Warsaw
During World War II,
Warsaw, part of central Poland came under the rule of the
General Government. All the universities and schools were immediately closed
and Warsaw's entire Jewish population – several hundred thousand some 30%
of the city, were put into the Warsaw Ghetto starting on October 12th 1940.
The order came to eliminate the ghetto as part
of Hitler's "Final Solution" on April 19th 1943.By the time the war
ended almost all of the Jews had been killed. Only a few managed to
escape or hide. Polish civilian deaths were between 150,000 and 200,000.
Warsaw had been completely destroyed
during the war. In order to restore the city, the Poles built houses for
the people who had lost theirs during the war, as well as universities and churches. Warsaw, the capital and largest city in Poland, boasted a population of almost 2 million making it the 9th largest city, according to population, in the European Union.
Today, groups of Jews from all over the world come to Warsaw. Where they try to experience what happened there during the war. They visit the ghettoes the concentration camps, the death camps and other sites in order to try and empathize with the Jewish people who lived there during the war.
Today, groups of Jews from all over the world come to Warsaw. Where they try to experience what happened there during the war. They visit the ghettoes the concentration camps, the death camps and other sites in order to try and empathize with the Jewish people who lived there during the war.
