During the war, Bronia met some “magnificent human beings,” as she calls them. One was named Bozenka, a Jewish nurse from Slovakia who worked in the Auschwitz infirmary, known as the revier. Four times Bronia would have died if not for Bozenka. “Bozenka didn’t even know my name at first, but she risked her life to save me. There were selfless heroes then, just like in the war now.”

Mila, Bronia, and all those in the right line who had been “granted life” were moved to the cramped, horrific living quarters of Auschwitz. Mila quickly came down with typhus and had to be moved to the revier barracks, where the sick were housed. “I didn’t want to part from Mila, my idol, so I voluntarily went with her to the revier.” Tragically, orders were given to have the revier cleared out and its ill occupants sent to the gas chamber.

“Bozenka persuaded me to leave, saving my life by hiding me in a Christian barrack. That was the fourth time Hashem saved me.” Mila was sent to the gas chambers with the rest of the sick.

“I was all alone in Auschwitz after that. I knew no one,” Bronia remembers. It wasn’t long before she also came down with typhus and was sent to the revier barracks. Bozenka looked after her and, at one point, called her aside to tell her that the Nazis were preparing to send the sick to the gas chambers. “It was a big risk for Bozenka to give me this warning.”

That same day, Mengele came to the barracks and wrote down Bronia’s number, along with the rest of the sick group. “Bozenka pushed me to beg him for my life,” Bronia remembers. “Naturally, I hesitated, but Bozenka kept insisting.”

Finally, Bronia mustered up the courage and ran after Mengele to ask him to spare her life. Just then, a loud siren rang out. Allied planes were circling Auschwitz. Mengele ran for cover, in panic, without responding to Bronia. Later, Mengele’s junior officer asked Bozenka how Mengele responded to Bronia, and Bozenka lied. She said that Mengele agreed to remove Bronia’s card, as well as five other cards of prisoners from the gas chamber list. “That was the fifth time Hashem saved my life,” Bronia says.

In December 1944, Bronia came down with a second bout of typhus, which put her in a coma. By then the gas chambers were destroyed, so there was no risk of her ending up there. She came out of the coma in mid-January 1945, a few days before the Nazis began to evacuate Auschwitz.

With the allies closing in, the Nazis forced the Jews to trek from Poland to Germany on foot. “They called it a ‘death march’ as we were forced to march without food and drink. And if you slowed down, you were shot,” Bronia says. “Once again, there was Bozenka, helping everyone walk. She was bigger than me and ten years older. I was walking very slowly because I’d just gotten out of a four-week coma and was still burning up with fever. Bozenka saw a gun being prepared for me to be shot, so she quickly picked me up and carried me, risking her own life. Had she not done so, I certainly would’ve been shot to death.” That was the sixth time Bronia was saved.

Bozenka, Bronia, and the other Jews who had survived the death march arrived in Ravensbrück. “The camp was built to house 5,000 people, but there were 125,000 people there,” says Bronia, who was forced to sleep outdoors with a fever. “Bozenka saved me there again, by somehow managing to sneak me out with a group of adults who were being transported elsewhere. I later learned that all the children at that camp were gassed. I was about thirteen years old at the time, so I would’ve been murdered, too. That was the seventh time I was saved.”

Neustadt-Glewe was the last camp they were dragged to. “The Nazis believed that if you didn’t work, why should they feed you?” Bronia says. Even for the adults who did work, food was scarce. Bronia would have starved if not for Bozenka, who shared her meager rations. That food sustained Bronia until the camp was liberated by the American and Russian armies in May 1945.

“Baruch Hashem, the war ended. But I felt alone in the world. All my family — even my aunts, uncles, and almost all my cousins — had been murdered. In Poland, three million Jews were murdered. That was ninety percent of the Jewish population,” Bronia stresses. “I was still a child of only fourteen when the war ended, and being so young, Bozenka invited me to the house in Slovakia where she was staying.”

Bronia was eventually reunited with her older brother, Mendek; of the 40 young men taken from their hometown to the Blechhammer labor camp, he was the only one to survive. A few months later, a cousin from Israel found her, and eventually a cousin in America managed to bring both Bronia and Mendek to America.

“I left Bozenka with great sadness and gratefulness. We remained in close contact until Bozenka passed away at the age of ninety-six.” A beautiful photo of the two is proudly displayed in Bronia’s living room.

Another “magnificent human being” in Bronia’s life was her cousin Simon Geldwerth from Vienna. Bronia’s face lights up when she speaks about him. “During the war, he used to beat up the Nazis, as he was an athletic soccer player. He somehow escaped to Italy and ultimately to America. Simon got things done! He helped his parents, brother, and sister-in-law get out of a concentration camp one day before Pearl Harbor. He worked with a philatelist [stamp collector], who helped Simon get them all out. Then he supported them all in his Brooklyn apartment.”

Simon pulled off the impossible by bringing Bronia and Mendek over to America right after the war ended. He managed to get them on the second boat out of Germany, despite Bronia’s fragile lung condition. “I was still a child then, so I never knew what my condition actually was. All I remember is that the authorities were arguing that I might be contagious and could infect others. I had to be tested repeatedly and they demanded I get tested again right after I got off the boat in America. I was escorted by the police to Ellis Island due to my ‘condition.’ At fifteen years old, I felt like this made me look either important or like a criminal, but both were funny! Thankfully, I wasn’t contagious and didn’t have to be put into isolation. I was finally free.”

The Aftermath: Rebuilding

“You were free,” I can’t help saying, “but then what? How did you move on?” Bronia had lost everything except for one brother, she was living in a country where she didn’t know anyone beyond Simon’s family, and she didn’t speak the language.

“I was totally devoid of all emotion,” Bronia remembers. “I was an emotional zombie. Externally, however, I pushed myself to do the right things.” Among the “right things” Bronia did was pursue an education. “I am blessed with a curious and adamant character by nature, and this alone motivated me to do well in school, even though I was fresh off the boat. I always wanted to be independent, to earn a living, and to remain a lifelong learner. It’s just who I am!” she says.

Bronia shares a revealing story from her childhood. Her father was trying to teach her older brother German, and Bronia, being too young to join the lessons, decided to listen in. “I’m proud to say that at the end of the lessons, I spoke German but my brother did not!” she laughs. In Poland, she attended a Bais Yaakov daily after public school, so she also knew how to daven in Hebrew. With several languages under her belt, Bronia wasn’t intimidated by the English language — she was excited by the challenge of learning it.

“I bought a big box of one thousand English word cards and memorized them all easily,” she remembers. Bronia managed to graduate from New Utrecht High School in three years with honors and from Brooklyn College, magna cum laude. She then obtained a master’s degree in education, with a minor in Jewish Studies.

Despite her academic success, Bronia was still living with fear and trauma inside. “Just because I did well in school and became a teacher, it wasn’t simple to be ‘normal’ after living through the trauma of the Holocaust. You never get over trauma — you just learn to adjust to it and live with it.”

In those early years in Brooklyn, Bronia walked around terrified of police officers, dogs, and any authority figures because they triggered memories of the Nazis. Her heart would race when she saw them, and it would cause tremendous anxiety.

To this day, Bronia has a total inability to cry. The last time she cried was in 1942, in that crowded schoolyard with Nazis and dogs, when her parents and brother Tulek were taken to Auschwitz. Decades later, she still cannot cry. She wasn’t even able to cry when her husband passed away.

Bronia is a woman of great faith, and I wondered how that played a role in her healing.

“I’m not a ‘believer’ in Hashem just because I was personally saved,” she says. “My belief comes from the strong upbringing in my home. My father, Yisrael Rubin a”h, was a big talmid chacham, and a descendent of the Rema. My father’s uncles — the Tchebiner Rav, the Rimmelov Rav, and the Dumbrova Rav — were gedolei hador in Poland. My parents taught us to have a love of Hashem and all of creation. They nurtured in us a love of learning Torah, of Jewish studies, and of secular studies.”

Even with this impressive background, Bronia admits that she struggled with her faith during the war. “Faith was a rollercoaster for me, especially in Auschwitz,” she says honestly. “But afterward, I knew that I could only live the frume way.”

When I press her and ask why, she replies clearly and succinctly: “Because I have a great love for Jews, for Judaism, a pride in our Torah, and somehow I just came to the realization that this was just me and who I am.”

She pauses, then adds, “I also believe that life needs Hashem in it. When life gets really hard, your belief in Hashem helps you to accept challenges. It only works, though, if you actually believe in Him,” she adds with her characteristic smile.

During those postwar years, a strong support system is what sustained Bronia. Her beloved older brother Mendek was her confidant. (He eventually became an inventor whose work was honored in the Smithsonian Institution.) Their cousin Simon was devoted to both siblings. “He was such a special human being, always there to help my family,” Bronia says. “Mendek and I lived with Simon, his wife, and their family in a three-bedroom apartment for seven years, up until I got married.”

With her husband, Ephraim Brandman a”h, Bronia rebuilt from the ashes. “My husband was also a Holocaust survivor, but he was never in the camps. He survived with his family by running from Poland to Russia during the war.” Together, the couple raised two daughters — a new generation of Jews.

Living with Trauma

Motherhood brought a new wave of challenges. Before her daughters were born, Bronia questioned whether she even had a right to bring children into the world. “I thought to myself, why should I, when they’ll have to survive such a hostile world? After I had kids, I believed I had to raise them to be strong enough to survive in a hostile world and withstand the hard life of a Jew.”

Because of her experiences in the Holocaust and the anti-Semitic climate after it, Bronia attempted to raise her kids with suffering. She refused to buy toys, and did things to train her daughters to be able to withstand hardship. “I wanted them to be able to survive the next Holocaust,” Bronia says.

“What made you think there would be another one?” I ask gently.

“I felt that the inhumanity of the Germans was ‘in the gut’ of the world. Remember, Germany was the most ‘cultured’ country, where so many Jews had assimilated and were at the top of the pyramid of society and best friends with their German neighbors. But in one day, the friendship turned to murder. So with my kids, I wanted to prepare them. I thought if they were deprived, they’d be tough enough to fend for themselves.” Bronia sincerely thought it would be in their best interest.

“I don’t remember when and how I realized my approach was all wrong, and that my thinking was warped,” she reflects. But through life experience and some trial and error, she realized that, “A child only gets stronger through love. I needed to grow and evolve after what I went through to come to a healthy way of thinking. But this took a long time.”

After the war, it was considered strange to seek mental health treatment, even for people who’d endured the trauma of the Holocaust. But that wasn’t what prevented Bronia from seeking therapy. “Back then, I couldn’t afford it,” she says. “But more than that, I thought I had all the answers. I thought I’d figured it all out.”

Though Bronia wasn’t in therapy, she was still open to learning about psychology. “At one point, I got extremely into the idea of filling myself up with ideas on healing,” she says. “In the 1960s, I joined the first ‘group therapy’ group offered by Maimonides Hospital in Boro Park. I did this even though the field of psychology was verboten in those days.” After that, she searched out any and all free courses in psychology and social work.

“I was obsessed with self-improvement,” she says. “I even joined a course that was open only to social workers. At that course, I freely offered my advice until one social worker dressed me down. ‘You act as if you know all the answers. But you don’t!’ he told me. I heard him. And from that point on, I was much more open in my journey toward self-discovery.”

In the 1980s, Bronia was trying to help a family member who was struggling with a serious illness. One doctor mentioned that an alternative medicine technique called “therapeutic touch” (commonly referred to as “TT”) might help. That was all Bronia needed to hear — she immediately took a course on it in Rye, New York, and then later at New York University.

“One of the main tenets of TT is positive thinking,” Bronia shares. “Over the years, I’ve seen firsthand — and with others — that by changing your emotional state, you can reduce immediate pain and anxiety and promote ultimate healing.”

Getting to a positive state, however, requires fortitude. “In order to practice TT, I had to do a lot of work on myself. I had to break down the impermeable emotional barriers I had created for myself during the war — barriers that I had put up to protect myself and enable myself to survive. In the process of breaking down these barriers, my attitude changed. I began to see how pivotal unconditional love is. What I learned in my own healing journey, and what I teach others, is how important it is to fully love yourself the way Hashem does.”

When Bronia started speaking openly about her Holocaust experiences at the age of 65, she reached a new level of healing. “As I grew stronger in my journey of healing, I began to believe in the importance of instilling positivity in others and in teaching people how to cope with traumatic issues or stresses.”

Here I stop to praise Bronia. “You’re teaching others to overcome their own personal traumas, just like you did,” I say.

She looks at me with a smile and laughs. “I told you, I didn’t overcome! You never fully overcome trauma. I think about what happened during the Holocaust one-hundred percent of the time, even today. Or maybe I don’t think per se, but my trauma is always with me. I’m always feeling that I’m a refugee, a survivor, a victim. Slowly, you gain strength, but it’s still with me all the time. In fact, as I get older, it’s with me more because I have more time to think.

“It’s kind of like I live a double life,” she continues. “It may sound weird, but after trauma, you can function in two different spheres — ‘normal and healthy’ and ‘victim.’ On one level, you can be living very normally and healthily. But on another level, you’re operating from a place of a victim, where you can get stuck in negativity and not overcome. It fluctuates. It’s a constant battle.”

“Sounds like there’s no ‘cure’ for trauma,” I respond. “It’s more like a constant coping process.”

“Yes, exactly,” Bronia says. “It’s a constant work in progress. You need to be mindful and work on yourself with patience. You can’t just flip an ‘off switch’ and forget about what happened. Even today, I struggle with despondency and hopelessness sometimes. I can’t help but think that the evil behavior of the Nazis still lurks in the human psyche, so it can happen again. At the same time, I try to work on staying positive and living a full life.”

Over the years, Bronia developed techniques to help fight intrusive thoughts and heavy, negative feelings. The first involves shifting thinking patterns. “Our thinking is bad sometimes, especially in very hard times. If our mind rehashes things over and over again, it can harm us, silently killing us. The body generates negative reactions if we think negatively, so the idea is to think positively and feel the difference in our bodies. It’s hard work, but necessary.

“The Nazis wanted us to think negatively,” Bronia continues, “so they were constantly taunting us, telling us that we were subhuman through different means of verbal, emotional, and physical abuse. They wanted the survivors who finally made it out alive to do themselves in… by keeping thinking negatively. I tell people, ‘By you feeling negative, you’re helping them, the ones who caused you the trauma, to win.’

“What I focus on most is being positive,” Bronia adds. “When you’re positive, things tend to work out well.  It’s not always easy to be positive — especially in these very difficult times — but it’s crucial that you use every tool available to stay positive, whether it be music, nature, prayer, or social interaction.”

On her own, Bronia realized how much chizuk you can get by focusing on your strengths, which is actually a foundational coping strategy, called the “strength-based perspective.” Not only does this technique help on a personal level, but also on a global level, as Bronia points out:

“During these hard times today, we need to remember to feel our strength as Jews,” she says. “Think about it. We have been persecuted and murdered throughout the ages, yet we are still here. Anti-Semitism has increased 360 times since October 7, yet we are still a light unto the nations. Compare our laws of the army to that of Hamas’s ways of operation. Look at our ethics, our consideration of civilians — see our beauty. The idea is to remember our strengths from the past to face the future of today, reminding ourselves that we will overcome, just as we have until now.”

Bronia shares a memory of her inaugural visit to Israel. “I was 37 years old and, for the first time in 23 years, I laughed. I was able to laugh! I felt like I was six feet tall [even though she’s only four foot eight]. Look at Israel — it started off as a swamp and it advanced in science, it’s one of the happiest countries, and it’s the only democracy in the Middle East. I felt proud of my people. I felt proud that we had a land. And most of all, it felt like home.”

Choiceless Choices

Bronia’s third technique addresses guilt. After the Holocaust, many people suffered from survivor’s guilt, where they felt tremendous guilt for having survived when their loved ones perished. “To this day, I am tortured with guilt over abandoning my sister Mila,” Bronia admits. “It is an enduring and profound trauma that still colors my life.”

On that fateful day, when Bronia knew that her sister was slated to die with the sick in the revier barrack — but that she was going to be saved by Bozenka hiding her — she faced an impossible choice: Should she stay with Mila, who was dying, and perish with her? Or escape the death decree but in so doing, lose the chance to say goodbye to her only remaining sister, who, as Bronia says, “I adored beyond everything.”

It wasn’t just that. “How was I going to look into Mila’s eyes and tell her that she was going to die, and that I was going to live?” Bronia asks. “I chose to live, but to this day, I have not forgiven myself for my failure to support Mila as she walked to the gas chambers.”

I am quiet. “But how can you feel guilty?” I gently question. “You couldn’t save her life, and it wouldn’t have helped to be killed along with her. The guilt doesn’t seem to make sense.”

“Does guilt usually make sense?” Bronia replies. “Usually not, yet people feel it all the time. I still live with guilt for being saved by such unusual and amazing events during the Holocaust. I feel guilty saying that I was worthy of miracles, while others were not, but in my rational mind, I know it was all from Above. Trauma of any kind can make you feel guilty, even when it wasn’t your fault at all.”

I mention the hostages and how those who were freed still feel guilty for leaving their fellow hostages in the tunnels. How does one fight overwhelming feelings of guilt?

“You must check the guilt and think, ‘Is this rational?’” says Bronia. “There are many scenarios where we really have no choice, realistically speaking, although we think and feel or truly believe that we could have done better or differently. I call this concept ‘choiceless choices.’ ”

Bronia faced such a “choiceless choice” when she learned that she was singled out to be saved, but her sister was not. “This was an impossible choice. In essence, it wasn’t even a choice — it was a ‘choiceless choice.’ Once we realize that the choices aren’t always in our hands, there should be no guilt, or at least less guilt. But it takes work to stay in a rational mindset.”

I tell Bronia how amazing it is that she came to these realizations on her own.

“Well, it only took me fifty to sixty years to learn how to properly rationalize the negative thinking and guilty thoughts that were invading my brain and my life,” she says, laughing.

History Repeats Itself

Before I part ways with Bronia, I ask her if she can give us some chizuk. In today’s climate, how do we respond, or not respond, to those who deny or downplay our suffering, much as the world did during and after the Holocaust?

“Trust me, I worry every day,” she says. “The anti-Semitism we are seeing now — it reminds me of what happened in 1938 at the Evian Conference in France.” Delegates from 32 countries met to decide what to do with Hitler, and how to protect their countries from Hitler’s plan. “At the conference, the decision was made to appease Hitler by giving him important countries in order to save their countries, and to just let the suffering Jews fend for themselves,” she says.

Bronia remembers how in her hometown, she could see on a micro level what was happening on a macro level throughout Europe. “It was crazy how local police rounded up the Jews and collaborated with the Nazis to help them, and no one abroad gave a hoot about what was happening to the Jews, including America. History repeats itself, as we saw after October 7. There has always been anti-Semitism, but people just needed someone to spark the flame like Hitler did then, and like Hamas did on October 7.”

What alarms Bronia is the speed at which anti-Semitism travels today. “The hatred can reach the whole world even faster than it did during the Holocaust,” she says. “What we’re dealing with today is not the same because countries didn’t murder millions of Jews yet, but it is certainly going in that direction. And even though they haven’t murdered millions yet, they extract the same anti-Semitism that was expressed before, and once again it is universal.”

Bronia is a strong believer in advocacy. “You know me and how busy I am,” she says. “I try to speak about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism on Zoom to organizations, schools, and universities. I even went to the White House and gave testimony to President Biden and his aides for hours.”

Whether she’s speaking about the Holocaust to President Biden, Bais Yaakov girls, public school students, West Point cadets, Harvard graduate students, Holocaust education teachers, employees at law firms and other companies, or even on public television, Bronia always ends with a message of hope.

“After the horrific events of October 7, and despite the unbearable hostage situation and war in Israel, as well as global anti-Semitism, all of which horribly echo for me the events of the Holocaust, I still believe that the Jews will survive and win, because we have Hashem at our back.”

Though we are witnessing an increasing lack of support for Israel, “Don’t get caught up in what others think,” Bronia adds. “Rather, we should look within to ourselves and to our nation as a whole. As individuals, we must strengthen our thinking and face our lives with positivity. And once we are strong as individuals,” she finishes, “we can and must work to be strong as a klal.”

I couldn’t help but think that Bronia was the epitome of the lesson she was trying to convey.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 917)