My family was farmers. We had animals and fruit trees. My father used to make Slivovitz (a strong brandy made from plums). My father was in the Czech army, had a limp. I loved my mother very, very dearly. When I was a young girl, I went to Budapest and learned to become a seamstress.
My mother was taken away from me at the train station and put on a cattle car. I worked together with my sister in a German munitions factory finding the bullets that wouldn’t fire. My sister had dysentery and fouled herself while she was working. She was beaten to death on the spot with a rifle butt by a German Nazi guard.
I was in the ghetto of Mukacevo and in the concentration camps; Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Salzwedel, and was liberated by American soldiers at Buchenwald.
When I arrived at Auschwitz, they took my clothes from me, they gave me one dress and they cut off my hair. I was given a tattoo. One held my arm, the other did the work. Blood was all over.
I knew we were being liberated because I recognized the American flag from school. I returned home in the hope of finding my family. I found our home though was occupied by some local people from the village. I found no one from my family.
I went to a Displaced Person’s (DP) camp called New Palestina outside of Salzburg, Austria.
I met my husband, David Isaac Rosenberg in the DP camp; he was an Auschwitz survivor also. We were married on June 25, 1946. My son was born exactly one year later, June 25, 1947 in a hospital in Salzburg.
We emigrated to the United Stated in 1949 arriving in Boston. We crossed the Atlantic on board a converted US Navy signal ship called the USS Flasher. From there we went to New York briefly because I had friends there. We finally settled in Chicago because that’s where my husband had family; they had sponsored us to come to the United States. My daughter Ruchie was born in Chicago in 1949.
I worked as a seamstress in a couple of sweatshops. My husband worked as a Mashgiach in a slaughterhouse. He was fired because he was too strict in deciding what a kosher animal was and what was not. He then swept floors for retail stores on Maxwell Street. He finally went to work as a Shamas in a funeral parlor. He did Taharos and sewed the Tachrichim. He became an administrator there.
My husband died of cancer at the age 46; I was 38 years old with two children. I continued to work as a seamstress to feed my family along with my husband’s social security.