Zdjęcia w artykule: Andrzej Rudiak
Petersburg and, from 1909, Vienna. His brother Nathan left for Switzerland to study medicine. His mother stayed alone in Sauliai until 1915, when the Russian army burned the city and forced her to evacuate to Ukraine. After the war she joined her son in Vienna. She died there in 1939 after the Anschluss. By that time, Walter had taken refuge in Paris, where he survived thanks to money sent from his father and his brother Nathan, who left for the United States in 1940.
Among the eight deportees, Salomon Zilber is the only one to have survived the camps. Born in Skaudvilė, working for the Lloyd Orient & Palestine travel agency in Paris during the interwar period, he fled to Southern France in 1940 and took refuge in Nice, were he was arrested in 1944. After the war, he left for Israel in 1951. His famous brother Moshe Zilberg, a judge of the Israel Supreme Court, had lived there since 1929.
At first, Zofia Borensztejn was thought to have been born in Volno/Vilno/Vilnius but was in fact from Wolno/Wolynsk in Ukrain. Thanks to this error we discovered a very moving familial destiny. Zofia’s father was a merchant, but in 1920-1921 we found Zofia with her mother and sisters in the Rovno refugee camp, full of Jews fleeing Ukrainian pogroms – Zofia’s father had died. Her mother and sisters left for the United States, but Zofia married a man from Warsaw. They settled down in Paris and opened a sewing workshop. In 1942, Zofia’s husband and son were deported. Zofia was arrested two years later. Her daughter, Riva, had already run away from the family home to escape arrest and survive on the street. After the war, Riva Boren became a painter and married the writer Jacques Lanzmann; they lived together for two years. Jacques was a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and the brother of the famous Claude Lanzmann, who later made the film Shoah and made of this Hebraic word a synonym for ‘Holocaust’.