Sofia Jonisz Aptekar

 

RelatioNet Katza

Students: Gabby and Dan Goldstein

E-mail: dangold53@gmail.com

 

Survivor: Soffia Aptekar

Previous Family Name: Jonisz
Father's Name: Faivel
Mother's Name: Czarna
Brother's Name: Ijo
Sister's Name: Tusha
Date of Birth: 20/9/1915
Country of Birth: Poland                 
City of Birth: Warsaw

Sofia's Story

Soffia was born in Warsaw on September 20th1915 and was the eldest sister of Ijo and Tusha. From ages 6 to 18, she attended a private Jewish school.

In 1933, after she graduated from high school, she started studying psychology.   But the attitude towards the Jewish people had changed. There were acts of violence committed against Jews at the University of Warsaw. This situation and the difficult economic conditions drove Soffia to leave her studies and start working in her father's wholesale business.

On September 1^st 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Immediately after that the Red army ordered all able bodied Pole's to join the army. Following that order, all men in Soffia's family enrolled in the army- her father, her husband Zigmond (the two got married on April 7th 1938), her brother Ijo and her uncle.The conditions in Warsaw got worse since the bombing of Warsaw increased. The family decided to move to the basement of Soffia's father's business.

Since the soldiers in the family were serving in Bialystok, Soffia's mother thought that it would be better for Soffia to join the men there. She waited for the right time. One day a messenger, who looked and spoke German, brought her a letter from her father.

Her mother decided to send Soffia to her father with the messenger. Soffia, dressed as a village girl,walked with the messenger passing German military checkpoints.  At night they slept in the villages. After walking a great distance they arrived in Bialystok where her father and uncle were. Two days later, Soffia went to Krzemieniec to meet  her husband and brother.

After they met, they drove to Werba, where they lived for a while during which time Zigmond worked paving roads. After that they moved to Radziviluf where Zigmond continued working on the roads and they lived as poor refugees.  Each time Zigmond finished paving a part of the road they moved with all the other workers to a different place. The next village was Poswoloczysk.

On June 1^st 1939,  the war between Russia and Germany broke out, thus Soffia and Zigmond decided to move to inner Russia. They took the first train not knowing where they are going and found themselves in Tashkent, the  capital of Uzbekistan. Hundreds of refugees had come to Toshkent due to the war. Among them Soffia found her cousin Nathan Yonish and a couple of friends Adam and Franka Stern. All five of them decided to move to Kazakhstan since they had heard that the living conditions  were better there. When they arrived they decided to settle in an agricultural cooperative farm (known as a Kolkhoz) near Dzambul. At a later stage, Soffia and her husband were the only ones to stay there. Ijo died in combat in the Polish army in March 1945. Soffia and her husband lived out most of the war in Kazakhstan.

In 1945, at the end of the war during her first month of pregnancy, Soffia and Zigmond decided to take a train back to Warsaw. They didn't know what to expect. Warsaw was completely ruined. The Red Army had imposed a curfew. The situation in Poland was terrible, there were pogroms and Jews were killed. Soffia discovered that her mother had died of typus in the Ghetto and that her father and sister had been sent to Bergen Belzen concentration camp.

From Warsaw Soffia and Zigmond continued their journey and arrived at a transit camp in Austria called Kleinmunchen, in the American Zone where they stayed  for a few months.

 When Soffia was seven months pregnant the camp officials ordered the refugees to move to Italy in order to bring them closer to Palestine. On the journey from Austria to Italy, they walked thousands of miles going through Innsbruck and Milano .

 In 1946, they arrived at the Scuola Cadorna Refugee Camp.  Soffia had her newborn baby girl, Celina, two months later. Zigmond managed and taught road construction at the Ort professional school there enabling them to move out of the camp and rent a small apartment.  

At the same time, two of Zigmond's aunts, living in Argentina, invited Soffia and Zigmond to join them there. Although Argentina did not allow Jews into the country to organize the required papers - the Joint- a Jewish aid society, succeeded in doing that for them.

In 1948, they arrived in Argentina and settled into an apartment. Zigmond started working in an Austrian Jewish office as an independent engineer. Celina went to school and to high school.  

In the early 1960's, there was a wave of Anti-Semitism  in Argentina following the capture of Eichmann  so Soffia and Zigmond decided to move to Israel. They purchased an apartment in Ramat Gan and made Alia.

But the journey to Israel wasn’t easy.   They left Buenos Aires on a ship called Giulio Cesare on January 20, 1963 and arrived on Israeli shores one month afterwards. Once in Israel, they met Soffia's surviving cousins who had come to Israel both before and after the war.

 

Finally, Soffia and Zigmond felt they were home!

 

Warsaw

 

During World War II, Warsaw, part of central Poland came under the rule of the General Government. All the universities and schools were immediately closed and Warsaw's entire Jewish population – several hundred thousand some 30% of the city, were put into the Warsaw Ghetto starting on October 12th 1940.

The order came to eliminate the ghetto as part of Hitler's "Final Solution" on April 19th 1943.By the time the war ended almost all of the Jews  had been killed. Only a few managed to escape or hide. Polish civilian deaths were  between 150,000 and 200,000.

 Warsaw  had been completely destroyed during the war. In order to restore the city, the Poles built houses for the people who had lost theirs during the war, as well as universities and churches. Warsaw, the capital and largest city in Poland, boasted a population of almost 2 million making it the 9th largest city, according to population,  in the European Union. 


Today, groups of Jews from all over the world come to Warsaw. Where they try to experience what happened there during the war. They visit the ghettoes the concentration camps, the death camps and other sites in order to try and empathize with the Jewish people who lived there during the war.