Sonia Schreiber Weitz (1928–2010)

Sonia Schreiber Weitz was born to a Jewish family in Kraków, Poland. She was 11 years old when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 at the start of World War II. She and her family were forced into the Kraków Ghetto in 1941. Her mother was taken away to Belzec, where she died, and Sonia and her older sister Blanca were deported to the Plaszow slave labor camp and later to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Venusberg, and Mauthausen. They survived to be liberated by the U.S. army in 1945. The sisters spent three years in displaced persons camps in Austria before being allowed to emigrate to the USA in 1948. Sonia married Mark Weitz, a physician, with whom she had three children. She spoke publicly of her experiences and with Harriet Tarnor Wacks, founded the Holocaust Center of Boston North in 1981. In 2002, she was appointed to the advisory council of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Her memoir, I Promised I Would Tell, was first published in 1993.