Klara Samuels (1927–2012)

Klara Samuels, née Salamon, was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland.
She was the only child of Dr. Moses Salamon, a successful bacteriologist, and his wife Rosa. Klara attended a private Jewish school, even though she was not religious, and loved reading and acting out plays. Her carefree life came to an end in 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland in World War II. During the war, moving from place to place, she learned several languages to add to her already wide fluency, eventually speaking Polish, Russian, English, French, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew. After the initial bombing of Warsaw, her parents decided to move east to Vilnius (Vilna), Lithuania, then in Russian territory. They were arrested at the border by Soviet authorities and sent to the Grodno Prison. Klara and her mother were soon released, but her father spent another 14 months imprisoned in Baranowicze. They waited for him in the town of Slonim (now in Belarus). After Germany invaded Russia, her father decided it was safer to go back to Warsaw. There they hid in their house to avoid deportation, before being forced into the Warsaw Ghetto. Klara and her parents escaped with fake identity papers and passed as non-Jews, staying with a Polish family in Konstancin. After eight months, they tried to get to Switzerland, but were discovered and sent to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belson. Klara's father worked in the camp as a doctor and she assisted him as a nurse. Her mother died in 1944. In the final months of the war, the Nazis sent those still alive in Bergen-Belson on a death march. Klara and her father survived to be liberated by Allied troops in April 1945. They were given a pass to go to Paris. After a month there, she and her father decided to leave Europe and took a boat to Palestine, where they stayed two years. In 1947, Klara's uncle in Brooklyn sponsored her to come to the USA. In New York City, she attended Barnard College and in 1955 married Bertram Samuels, with whom she had two sons. She was a high school physics teacher in Livingston, New Jersey for many years. She wrote God Does Play Dice: The Autobiography of a Holocaust Survivor, published in 1999.