Literature of Holocaust and Genocide

Fanny Lesser’s LiberationFanny Fixler Lesser, born in Majdan, a shtetl in Czechoslovakia, near Chust, was one of nine children. In 1944, the family was deported to Auschwitz Concentration Camp, where Fanny was separated from her family. She was selected and sent to Weiswasser, a Nazi slave labor camp in Poland. During a death march a year later, Fanny and other women were exchanged by the Nazis for trucks and ammunition given by Sweden. The Swedish Red Cross then took the women to Sweden to recuperate. There Fanny learned that only her father and two oldest brothers had survived.

While on a train in Germany, in 1948 Fanny met her future husband, Max. They married and immigrated to the United States, settling in South Jersey. They have four children.

Max died in 2004, but he is memorialized in Fanny’s memoir, Lives Entwined: Fanny and Max Lesser, Holocaust Survivors, published September 2007.

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Sonia Kaplan was born in eastern Poland, in Wlodzimierz Volynski. In 1941, when Sonia was eleven, her town was occupied by the Nazis. Sonia was rescued twice in the ghetto. She eventually escaped to the forest where she joined the Russian partisans.

At the end of WW II, at fifteen, Sonia was the only survivor of her family. Sonia immigrated to the United States, to Atlantic County, first operating a chicken farm and later managing businesses and hotels. Sonia has two daughter, Gloria and Ellen, and one son, David. She has written her memoir, “My Endless War, My Shattered Dreams.”

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Rosalie Lebovic Simon was born in Tresea, Czechoslovakia, one of six children—five girls: Helen, Charlotte, Lenka, Rose, and Rosalie and a boy: William. In April of 1944 the family was moved from their home to the Mátészalka Ghetto. Then in May of 1944 the family was deported to Auschwitz Concentration Camp in the southwest of Poland. Eventually Rosalie was sent to two slave labor camps—Geislingen and Allach; both these labor camps were in Germany. In May 1945 as she was again being moved by the Germans, her train was liberated by American soldiers. In November of 1949 she immigrated to the United States, to Baltimore, Maryland where she met her husband, moving later to the Atlantic City area.

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