Finding Hope on the Other Side
| November 6, 2024Holocaust survivor Bronia Brandman shares her perspective on healing from trauma
I am sitting in Bronia Brandman’s meticulously clean and neat home in Boro Park, Brooklyn. Her very presence exudes warmth and hope. Photos of her children and grandchildren adorn the walls and shelves of her home. Bronia is one of many Holocaust survivors I’ve been privileged to meet through my work as a social worker for the JCC of Greater Coney Island and the director of Connect2, which offers companionship and support to Holocaust survivors in the New York City area.
For decades, Bronia was silent about her experiences in the Holocaust. “Don’t fall over,” she says. “But I didn’t speak of the trauma for fifty years. I believe in helping others learn how to cope, though. That’s why, at the age of sixty-five, I started working at the Museum of Jewish Heritage as a gallery educator, and eventually became a senior speaker.”
Bronia doesn’t just share her personal story with others; she speaks about how to pick ourselves up after tragedy, deal with trauma, and keep going. It’s a message that we all need to hear in our post-October 7 world.
“There is no getting over trauma, as we are simply changed by it, both in mind and body. Period,” says Bronia, who survived several concentration camps and a death march. “There is healing, though. And hope.”
A Child of War
Bronia was eight years old when World War II broke out. She was living in Jaworzno, Poland with her parents (Israel and Ida Rubin), three older siblings (Mila, Mendek, and Tulek), and two younger sisters (Rutka and Macia).
“Hashem saved me seven times,” Bronia says. “I walked away from the craziest situations, where I should have been killed for one reason or another. Yet, each time, I simply got away. The first time was when a soldier walked my family out of our house at gunpoint but I managed to hide behind a door,” she says.
In March 1942, the eldest of each family had to report for deportation. Mendek volunteered to go in place of his older sister, Mila, and was taken to Blechhammer labor camp. The following August, Bronia, her parents, and her brother Tulek were herded into a schoolyard surrounded by Germans with guns and dogs. “My mother urged me to leave and I just walked out. That was the second time Hashem saved my life. My parents and brother were deported to Auschwitz and murdered upon arrival.”
Bronia and her three sisters fled to the nearby town of Sosnowiec, where they stayed for a few months before the Nazis forced them into a ghetto. In August 1943, the four sisters were deported to Auschwitz. SS Officer Mengele, known as “the angel of death,” separated the new arrivals into two lines. “He directed Mila to the right line, while my two baby sisters and I were directed to the left line. As I had adored Mila all my life, I ran to her line. No one stopped me, but at that instant, I realized that I had left my two baby sisters to walk alone to the gas chambers. My heart turned to stone. That was the third time Hashem saved my life.”
Oops! We could not locate your form.