The Museum community mourns the loss of Holocaust survivor Millie Zuckerman (née Mark) on August 9, 2020, 78 years after her family narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Nazis.
Born in Humniska, Poland in September 1925, Millie and her family were forced into hard labor in the town of Brzozów once the Nazis declared Humniska was to be Judenrein (“clean of Jews”). In Brzozów, Millie’s father decided the family must escape the night before all Jews were required to gather in a town stadium on August 9, 1942. Under cover of darkness, Millie’s family fled and went back to Humniska.
Those who did not escape Brzozów, as Millie’s family did, were murdered in that stadium on August 10.
In Humniska, Millie’s family hid for two years in the attic of Michelina Kedra, a Polish friend.
For four years after liberation, Millie lived in the Bindermichl Displaced Persons camp in Austria, where she met her husband Abe. Abe z’l had survived multiple ghettos and concentration camps and worked at Schindler’s factory. (Read more about the impact Oskar Schindler had on Abe’s life in this 2018 article.)
The couple immigrated to the U.S. in 1949 where they had three children. Their son Wayne serves on the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation Board of Trustees, and he and his wife Deborah both serve on the Museum’s Board of Overseers.
Millie committed her life to remembering those murdered in the Holocaust. Her legacy lives on in the lives of the family she and Abe created.