Lola Margulies
Lola Margulies was born in Zaleszeziki, Poland and moved to the small Polish town of Skalat after Hitler defeated Poland in 1939. She was 11 years old when the German army invaded this part of Poland after declaring war on Russia in 1941. Her paternal grandfather was among the first 400 Jewish victims slaughtered the week the Germans invaded Skalat. She, together with all other Jews in town were interned in a ghetto under extremely overcrowded conditions, with very little food and under constant threat of being deported to the death camps by the periodic "actions" carried out by the Gestapo in the middle of the night.
After the Ghetto was liquidated in 1943, she spent a few weeks in a labor camp and just before skalat became "juden-frei" (cleansed of Jews) she escaped to the woods where she and her immediate family were hidden ten feet underground in a bunker for nine months. They were without daylight, starving, packed like sardines and living in filth in this grave for the living. The Russian army liberated her in 1944. In 1947 she immigrated to the United States.
Mrs. Margulies has spoken to High School students about her wartime experience and some of these memories have been recorded in a testimony, which is part of a collection of Testimonies published in a book entitled "death of a Shtetl". The book is in the archives of various Holocaust museums. Her presentation will cover the above experience.
A Conversation with Dr. Lola Margulies - New Rochelle High School, June 2017