Holocaust Testimony Of Vera Neuman Otelsberg

Vera Otelsberg, nee Neuman, was born in 1924 in Bielitz (Bielsko-Biala), Poland. Her family was wealthy, her father was an industrialist who owned several factories and a mill. Her mother died when she was a young child and she was brought up by a nanny. The family was not religious, attended synagogue only on the High Holidays. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she escaped to Warsaw with her older sister, her sister's family. Her sister's whole family were able to buy visas to South America and left in 1940 while Vera stayed in the Warsaw Ghetto with her sister's mother-in-law. She was able to get some money through a relative on the Aryan side of Warsaw. She worked at the Toebbens factory but later was able to escape from the Ghetto. She lived on the outside on false papers, worked as a maid in a German household and later, in a village, listened to the radio illegally and translated the reports into Polish for an underground paper. She describes life in Sochaczew before and during the retreat of the Germans and the killing of German soldiers by the advancing Russians. When Bielitz was liberated, she returned home with help from Russian Jewish officers. Her father had perished in Lemberg. Eventually she married, had a daughter and in 1957 moved to Montevideo, Uruguay. She describes several instances of help from Poles and Germans.