Malvina Graf (1922–2007)

Beginning in 1939, Malvina Graf and four of her siblings, from a Polish-Jewish family, survived six years of Soviet and then German occupation of Lvov and Kraków, as well as the adjoining Nazi concentration camp of Plaszów. Two of her three sisters were deported to the death camp at Auschwitz, but endured to rejoin the other two at the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. With the advance of the Red Army near the end of World War II, they shared forced marches to other camps, despite a raging typhus epidemic. Luck and resourcefulness, such as that of her older sister Balbina, helped Malvina to preserve her life and sanity. Due to post-war anti-Semitism, Malvina Graf emigrated to the USA in 1947 and became an American citizen. She taught elementary school in New York City and wrote a memoir, The Kraków Ghetto and the Plaszów Camp Remembered, published in 1989.