Marta Wise / Marta Weiss (F / Slovakia, 1934), Holocaust survivor

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Marta Wise / Marta Weiss (F / Slovakia, 1934), Holocaust survivor

Eva Slonim / Eva Weiss (F / Slovakia, 1931), Holocaust survivor

Biography

Marta Wise (née Weiss) was born on 8 October 1934, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. Her parents were Eugen Yaakov and Margaret Meital Weiss, andshe had eight sisters and a brother.

During the war, Marta was able to live under an assumed Aryan identity with false papers for a while, but on 8 October 1944, she was arrested and sent to the Sered camp. On 3 November 1944 Marta was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She and her sister Eva (on her right in the photograph), were kept in Mengele’s medical experiments block together with the twins and dwarfs. They managed to stay alive there until the liberation. Looking back, she maintains that her survival was largely thanks to pure luck. Marta and Eva were liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945.

After the war, Marta moved to Australia, where she became a historian. She emigrated to Israel in 1998, and today lives in Jerusalem. She is a mother of 3 and grandmother of 14. She volunteers as a guide at Yad Vashem.

Auschwitz Picture

Auschwitz Children2.jpg Auschwitz Children.jpg

She is present in an iconic Auschwitz picture, that depicts 13 child survivors, shortly after the liberation of the camp. All of them have been identified. From left to right they are:

Marta Wise was among the seven children who reunited on 27 January 2005 in the ceremony in Poland marking 60 years since the liberation of Auschwitz (photograph by Dalit Shacham). The group included (from left to right): Tomy Shacham (1); Erika Dohan (6); Marta Wise (7); Eva Slonim (8); Shmuel Schelach (11); Gabriel Neumann (10); and Bracha Katz (5).

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In separate reunion four other survivors gathered in Krakow, Poland on 26 January 2015, at the invitation of the USF Shoah Foundation, on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp. The Group included (from left to right): Paula Lebovics (3), Miriam Ziegler (2), Gabor Hirsch (9), and Eva Kor (12). (Photo by Ian Gavan/Getty Images).

USF Shoah Foundation

Marta Wise says it was nothing but “pure, unadulterated luck” that allowed her to survive the Holocaust.

Born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, on Oct. 8, 1934, Marta lived happily with her brother, four sisters and parents, who owned textile mills and shops and maintained a very religious household. Once Germans occupied their country, however, Marta’s father sent each of the children out of Czechoslovakia with false papers; a German woman named Mrs. Tafon passed Marta off as her daughter and took her to a distant cousin of Marta’s in Hungary, where Marta lived for two years.

In 1944, Germany invaded Hungary and conditions became just as dangerous as in Czechoslovakia. Marta’s father quickly sent Mrs. Tafon to take Marta to Budapest to begin the journey back to Czechoslovakia. In Budapest, Marta’s aunt gave her an agonizing choice: sail with a group of children to Palestine or return home to her parents. Marta, still only nine years old, chose home. The boat to Palestine sank, killing every child on board.

After a harrowing two-day trek through wheat fields over the border, Marta joined her younger sister Eva in Czechoslovakia for two months pretending to be Catholic. The sisters were arrested on Marta’s 10th birthday, interrogated and beaten for a week but they refused to admit they were Jewish. Eventually, the family’s former nanny was questioned and she immediately betrayed them. Marta and Eva were sent to the Séréd transit camp and from there to Auschwitz.

During the selection upon their arrival in Auschwitz, Eva was sent to the right and Marta to the left, which meant her immediate death in the gas chambers. But at that moment, Soviet planes flew overhead and the two lines were pushed back together in the subsequent confusion. Marta was saved, and the two were sent to the “family camp” section of Auschwitz. There, Dr. Josef Mengele gave them mysterious injections (Marta has never known what they were for) and they spent their days trying simply to survive.

In January 1945, the approaching Soviet Army triggered the Germans to send the majority of camp inmates on what would be death marches to lands that were still under German control, but Eva and Marta stayed behind, and the Red Army liberated them on January 27, 1945. After a few months of recuperation, they hitchhiked their way back to the old family home in Bratislava, where they were reunited with their parents and all their siblings except their little sister Judith, who they found out had died in Auschwitz. But not long after, their older brother Kurti drowned, and the family left Czechoslovakia for Australia in 1948.

Marta finished school, studied physiotherapy and in 1967 married Englishman Harold Wise. In 1998, they moved to Israel. They have three daughters, Judy, Michelle and Miriam, and 14 grandchildren.

External links

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