Naomi Samson / Naomi Rosenberg (F / Poland, 1933), Holocaust survivor

Naomi Samson / Naomi Rosenberg (F / Poland, 1933), Holocaust survivor.

• KEYWORDS : <Poland> <Hidden Children>

• MEMOIRS : Hide (2000)

Biography

Born in 1933, Naomi Rosenberg survived in hiding with her mother in the Polish countryside.

Book : Hide (2000)

• Hide: A Child's View of the Holocaust (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

"In 1942 German Nazis and Polish collaborators drove nine-year-old Naomi Rosenberg and her family from the town of Goray, Poland, and into hiding. For nearly two years they were forced to take refuge in a crawl space beneath a barn. In this tense and moving memoir, the author tells of her terror and confusion as a child literally buried alive. Her family owed their survival to the reluctant and constantly wavering support of the barn owners, gentiles torn between compassion for Naomi's family and fear of a Nazi death sentence if the family was discovered."--Publisher description.

"Memoirs of a Jewish woman, born in 1933 to the Rosenberg family in Goraj, south of Lublin, Poland. During the Nazi occupation the family fled from Goraj to nearby Frampol, and Samson's father was killed on the way. In November 1942, during the Nazi roundup in Frampol, the Rosenbergs left the town and, after some wandering, were hidden by Polish peasants - for a short period by the Sosnowicz family, and for a year and a half by Maria Kowalik. The memoirs begin with the escape from Frampol, but are interspersed with recollections of the first days of the war, the Goraj ghetto, and the flight from Goraj. Dwells on the complicated and ambivalent relations between Jews and Catholic Poles. There were many Poles who collaborated with the Germans in the persecution of Jews; there were others who helped them despite their fear, and some paid with their lives. After the war Samson settled in the USA."--Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism.