Remembering Aunt Mimi on Holocaust Remembrance day

Today, I find it fitting to share the story of my great-aunt Hermina. Her life was marked by profound resilience in the face of unimaginable adversity. Known to her family as Mimi, she was born in the glittering city of Vienna, Austria in 1899. As a younger woman, she moved to neighboring Slovakia, presumably to be with her husband.

During the war, in spite of the fact that she had converted to Catholicism, she was imprisoned at the Sered labor camp. After years of working under difficult conditions, she was shipped to the death camp, Auschwitz. There is no telling how long she was there, but what we do know is that she survived that horror and was liberated by the Soviets. She was treated by the Americans at Mauthausen, another Nazi camp which had been converted into a US army hospital. Records of the day state that she suffered from severe malnutrition.

International Red Cross card compiled in the 1960’s shows Hermina at various Nazi camps during the war.

Aunt Hermina, or Mimi, lived the remainder of her life behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia, never again living in freedom as she had as a youth in Vienna. She visited her sister (my grandma Ricky), in New Jersey in 1964, after the two of them had been separated for 27 years. Remarkably, there is a newspaper article about their reunion. The article is dated May 27, 1964, one day after Grandma Ricky’s birthday. A birthday reunion visit for the sisters.

Sisters reunited after 27 years, what an incredible story. No mention of me, I wasn’t born yet.

It makes my heart burst knowing that she flew over the New York World’s Fair in a helicopter on her way from JFK to Newark Airport. What a ride.