Doris Martin (1926–2022)

Doris Martin, née Szpringer, was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Będzin, Poland. She was 12 years old when Nazi Germany invaded her hometown in World War II and burned down the synagogue with some 200 Jews inside. She and her family were forced into a ghetto. In 1942, she was deported first to the death camp at Auschwitz and then sent to Ludwigsdorf, a forced labor camp. Her parents, sister, and two of her brothers posed as Polish citizens and lived in hiding during the war, while her third brother fled to the Soviet Union. All seven of them survived and were reunited after the war. After emigrating to the USA in 1950, Doris married Louis Rabinowitz, with whom she had a son. Rabinowitz died of cancer three years later. She remarried to Ralph Martin. They moved to Flagstaff, Arizona in 1971 and founded the Martin-Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University. Mrs. Martin told her family's story in her memoir, Kiss Every Step: A Survivor's Memoir from the Nazi Holocaust (2009).