In the second half of 1941, Sonia and her husband, Aron, were forced to leave their flat and move to the Lviv ghetto, “where the living conditions were far from human.”

 

At the beginning of 1944, around the time Sonia was leaving the ghetto, the house where she was staying got bombed. Sonia’s friend and her family decided to leave Lviv. They stopped in a rural location, where the residents “never paid very much attention to what was happening to other people.” And that’s how they lived day to day.  In the autumn of 1944, Sonia suddenly felt unusual. In all the time she had been married, she never became pregnant. Now it turned out she was expecting a child. 

 

Living by herself in southern Poland, near the border of what was Czechoslovakia, Sonia felt very isolated. Her husband, Aron Goldberg, had disap­peared and she did not know what happened to him. “Her situation was desperate,” she writes in her mem­oir. “I had no husband, no money. I did not want to leave that place because I still hoped my husband would come back.” He never did. Several months passed. The Soviets arrived in that part of Poland. Sonia gave birth to her son—Arie. Arie was born in Krynica, Poland, on March 17, 1945.  Sonia started asking around if there was an organization where she could get assistance and was directed to the local Jewish Agency. But the only help they could offer was to feed us. She was advised to go to Košice, Czechoslovakia, which was a large city, and there she would find a Jewish Agency. She was given 300 crowns and was grateful, though she later discovered she had been cheated because she did not know the exchange rate. She also had 1,000 Polish złoty with her. 

 

It was through one of her neighbors in the camp that my mother became acquainted with a war survivor by the name of Chaim Leibovitz. He had been in three differ­ent concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and had numbers tattooed on his arm. In his possession was a photograph of a group of World War II survivors, taken in Munich, Germany. They were all from Chaim’s hometown of Iwie (Ivye in Yiddish/Hebrew), Poland, which is now Lŭje, Belarus. He was born on October 10, 1901, in Lida, Poland, also Belarus today, and not far from Lŭje. Chaim physically was a very strong man, a common sense kind of person, and mechanically inclined. Those traits obvi­ously had helped him survive. Yet Chaim lost his wife and five children in the war.  Sonia and Chaim married on August 11, 1946 with plans to emigrate to America but Sonia and her children, Arie and stepdaughter Renya, had papers to go to Palestine from her former father-in-law, Abraham Goldberg.  Chaim told Sonia to go to Palestine as planned and he would follow soon after.  Chaim assumed Abraham Goldberg would help Sonia but what Sonia found out on arrival to Palestine was that Abraham Goldberg was killed in a car accident and the family wanted nothing to do with her because she had remarried.  On September 1, 1947 Sonia, Arie and Renya arrived in Palestine.  The Goldberg family treated Sonia so poorly they only ended up staying with them for a few months until Sonia could not take the poor treatment anymore and they left. In the meantime, the family had turned Renya against Sonia and were hiding her from Sonia.  When Sonia wanted to try to get custody of Renya, her husband Chaim, talked her out of it and Renya stayed with the Goldberg family.  Chaim arrived in Palestine in January, 1948.  They lived in Tel Aviv which was close to relatives of Sonia from Kovel.  

Never forget for it can happen again.