Sara Nomberg-Przytyk (1915–1996)

Sara Nomberg-Przytyk was born in Lublin, Poland, to a Hasidic Jewish family. She turned to Communism in her youth, and was first imprisoned in 1934 for her politics. She graduated from gymnasium and attended the University of Warsaw. During the German invasion of World War II, she fled east to Bialystok, where she became a teacher. She was imprisoned in the Bialystok Ghetto in 1941-1943. In 1944, she was sent to the concentration camp at Stutthof and then to Auschwitz. There she survived partly because she worked in the relative safety of the camp infirmary. She returned to Poland after the war to help build the new Communist government, working as a journalist and editor, until she and most of the remaining Jews in Poland were forced out of the country between 1967 and 1968. She went to live in Israel and later with her son Jurek Przytyk on his farm in Quebec, Canada. Her memoir, Auschwitz: True Tales From a Grotesque Land, had to be smuggled out of Poland because it was deemed "too Jewish" by the authorities. She placed it in the care of the Yad Vashem archives in Israel, and it was published in English in 1985. Sara had also published two earlier memoirs in Polish and was writing another when she died.