Miriam Wagman Liptcher was born in 1922 in Krakow, Poland. In September 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, her family moved to the town of Proszowice. Her father bartered for food with local farmers and they traveled by train to Krakow to smuggle supplies in and out of the city’s ghetto.
One day, Miriam was reported to a German officer by a Polish friend and was apprehended by the Nazis. This was the last time Miriam would ever see her family.
She was deported to Auschwitz where she made a commitment to try and help her fellow female prisoners to the extent that she was able to. When they were ordered to turn the earth over with their hands, she instructed them to eat roots for their nutritional value.
“My mother gave me this ring with my initials, Manya Wagman. When I came to Auschwitz I cried and asked them to let me keep the ring. And I managed to keep it. I still have it and I never take it off. It’s the only thing I have from my mother.”
In the spring of 1944, the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele conducted medical experiments on her, which left her unable to have children. Despite this heinous experiments, Miriam survived and in January 1945, Miriam was taken on a death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where she was eventually liberated in April 1945.
After her liberation, Miriam discovered that she was her family’s only survivor. In “Kibbutz Buchenwald,” one of 35 pre-aliyah training farms in post-war Germany, she met and married Rudy Liptcher, another Holocaust survivor. The couple left Europe shortly after and emigrated to Israel.
Source: Yad Vashem
