Esther Avruch – There were many children in Esther Fleischmann’s family. After the Germans took over Sochaczew, Poland, the children and their parents were able to stay together first in that town’s ghetto and then another, before all were forced to walk to Warsaw. When they arrived in the Warsaw Ghetto, the entire family of 12 lived in one room.
Esther was among the many children who stole away through holes in the ghetto wall to gather food. Over time, she made ever-more distant trips, sometimes walking an entire day on backroads to find peasants willing to share their food. While out on one of these forays – in July of 1942 – Esther’s family was taken from the ghetto and sent to Treblinka. For the remainder of the war, she moved from farm to farm, sometimes under the protection of peasant families.
After the war, she made her way to a Displaced Person camp in Traunstin, Germany. There she met the late Saul Avruch, who lost his mother and three brothers in the Holocaust. They were married in 1947 in the camp, and moved to the U.S. in 1949. After visiting Rock Island, Saul decided to move the family here in 1952. With Saul gone now, Esther moved to the Chicago area to be near her two children and five grandchildren.
Esther Avruch ready to speak at Quad Cities Christian School
Esther Katz (left) – Esther Holpert was born in Lochova, Czechoslovakia, in 1925, which came under Hungarian control in 1939. After the Nazis took over in 1944, Esther and her family were sent to Auschwitz, where she and her mother were separated from her father, brother and grandmother, never to see them again. Their first night there, the Alteste of Barracks C pointed to the smoke-filled sky and said, “That is your parents and children, brothers and sisters. They’re burning them.”
Five months later, Esther and her mother were sent to a work camp near Bergen-Belsen and with the aid of a sympathetic Belgian-German cook, they managed to survive. Just days after the guards abandoned the camp, armed German civilians forced the workers into Bergen-Belsen, where many died from typhus even after liberation, including Esther’s mother. Returning to Czechoslovakia, Esther met the late Isador Katz, a former soldier and partisan fighter whose children and first wife were killed by the Nazis.
In 1945 they married and started a new family, eventually making their way to Vienna before emigrating first to Canada, then to the U.S. When Isador saw an ad seeking a kosher butcher in Rock Island, the family packed up one last time. Sadly Esther passed away in July of 2005 and left behind two children and three grandchildren.
Remember Esther Katz
Esther Schiff (center) – Esther Stiller was only nine months old when her father died. She, her brother and her half-sister were raised by their mother with help from the supportive Jewish community in Kalisz, Poland. She wasn’t quite 14 when the Nazis invaded and forced all of the Jews in Kalisz from their homes. She returned alone, however, and was picked up by a German officer who took her to Breslau to be a servant. When an opportunity arose, she ran away and joined a transport of Poles being sent west as farm laborers. Adopting a false name, she told officials she had lost her identification papers. From the religion classes in Poland’s public schools, she had learned enough about liturgy and ritual to convince the Germans and fellow Poles that she was Catholic.
She survived the war working as forced labor on farms near Munich, and thought the war interminable until her liberation was heralded by the sudden appearance of “all those nice looking American soldiers”. Sponsored by relatives in NJ, she was in the US only eight months before she married one of those soldiers, Saul Schiff, who had just been discharged from the Army. The Schiff’s came to the Quad Cities when Saul’s work as an engineer brought him to the Rock Island Arsenal. Today they are retired and have two children and two grandchildren.
Saul & Esther Schiff with Allan Ross, Director of the Jewish Federation of the Quad Cities