This blog series features the Holocaust survivors whose portraits were on view in our 2017 installation Eyewitness.

Aviva Blumberg
Aviva Blumberg photograph by B.A. Van Sise

Aviva Blumberg was born in Warsaw in 1931. Ms. Blumberg lived with her mother and sisters. Her father was a journalist who left to work in the United States in 1940.

Just before the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Ms. Blumberg was given to a stranger whom her mother had met casually. The family took the child as an act of defiance against the Nazis and also because they needed the money provided by the Jewish underground to care for the child.

After the Polish uprising in Warsaw, Ms. Blumberg was deported with the family who was hiding her. After they were liberated, Ms. Blumberg managed to get in touch with a family friend who immediately contacted her father, who had been searching for his family. She came to the United States in 1945.

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