Mira Ryczke Kimmelman (1923–2019)

Mira Ryczke Kimmelman was born to a Jewish family in a suburb of the Free City of Danzig (present-day Gdansk, Poland). When Nazi Germany annexed the city at the start of World War II, she and her family and other Jews were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, where they suffered from hunger, extreme cold, and disease. Though writing was forbidden, the Jewish administration of the ghetto opened secret schools that taught through song and poetry. Mira was both a teacher and a student. In 1942, her father and brother were taken for forced labor and the Germans liquidated the ghetto. Mira and her mother were marched to the railroad station, where they were separated by an SS officer. Mira was sent to Blizyn, a concentration camp attached to Majdanek in Poland, to Auschwitz, and then to Bergen-Belsen. She survived to be liberated by the British Army in April 1945 and reunited with her father. The rest of her extended family had been killed. She had no way of preserving her experiences on paper while they happened, but trained herself to memorize them. She married, emigrated to the USA, and settled in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She published two volumes of memoirs, Echoes From the Holocaust: A Memoir (1997) and Life Beyond the Holocaust: Memories & Realities (2005).