Survivor: Sally Zielinksi Roisman

Sally Roisman — at the time Sara Pola Zielinksi — was asleep in a bed she shared with her mother and two sisters in the Sosnowiec ghetto when she was suddenly awakened by loud pounding on the door. A Gestapo officer entered the room. “Get dressed,” he ordered, pointing at Sally. “You’re coming with us.” Sally hesitated, desperate to stay with her mother. “Do what they tell you, or they will shoot us all,” her mother said. Sally put on clothes and accompanied the officer, who loaded her onto a bus with a group of girls. It was March 1943; Sally was 12. 

Sally was born on Oct. 2, 1930, in Sosnowiec, Poland, to Shaja Beresh and Hinda Zielinski. She was the seventh of 12 children, though one son died before Sally was born. 

Theirs was a strictly Orthodox, middle-class family living in a three-bedroom apartment. Shaja Beresh, a rabbi and “a very pious man,” according to Sally, worked as a textile merchant to support his family. Sally recalls “so much love” from both her parents. 

At 7, Sally entered an all-girls Jewish school. She had some Christian friends in her mixed neighborhood but said that anti-Semitism was always prevalent, especially on Sundays after church.

In early September 1939, hearing that German soldiers were approaching Sosnowiec, Sally’s parents loaded the family into a horse-drawn carriage and headed deeper into Poland. En route, however, they were attacked by Polish robbers who stole some of their valuables. Soon after, they returned to Sosnowiec, which the German army had occupied on Sept. 4. 

On Sept. 9, the Germans set fire to the city’s Great Synagogue, on Dekerta Street. Sally recalls seeing burned Torahs and siddurs. The Germans also killed several prominent Jews. “Fear overtook us,” Sally said. 

Her school was shut down, and Shaja Beresh’s small warehouse was confiscated. Jews were allowed to shop only during specified hours, and Sally, because she didn’t look Jewish, would go to a Polish store to exchange jewelry for food. 

Shaja Beresh, who had heard German soldiers were ripping Jews’ beards out by the roots, hid his almost waist-length beard inside his fur coat whenever he went out. Then, fearing for his life, he cut it. “His whole personality changed,” Sally said. 

During 1941, three of Sally’s brothers were taken to a labor camp. Sally’s two older sisters, Edzia and Manya, worked in a textile factory, sewing uniforms for German soldiers. Sally also worked there for a short time.

Deportations had been occurring regularly, but in the summer of 1942, all the Jews in Sosnowiec were ordered to report to a large, empty area where a German official with a stick directed them to the right or left. When Sally’s family approached, Shaja Beresh was sent to one side and the rest of the family to the other. “We never saw our father again,” Sally said. They subsequently learned he had been transported to Auschwitz.

Soon after, the Jews were forced to move to the ghetto, which was located in Srodula, a suburb of Sosnowiec. Sally, her mother, seven siblings and a paternal aunt lived in one room along with two other families. 

One day, around February 1943, Edzia and Manya did not return from the factory. The family learned they had been taken by German soldiers.

About a month later, after being snatched from her mother’s bed, Sally and other local girls were sent to Graeben, a women’s labor camp in Strzegom, Poland. There, she was reunited with her sisters. “It was unbelievable,” Sally recalled. “Without them, I wouldn’t have survived.” 

The young women worked 12-hour shifts in a flax factory. Initially Sally was given light work, drying the flax. “I was a good worker. I listened and did what I was told,” Sally said. She later requested and was permitted to transfer to her sisters’ more strenuous work detail, which entailed picking up wet flax and placing it on a conveyor belt. 

Czechoslovakian civilians also worked at the factory. They weren’t allowed to mingle with the prisoners, but one man took a liking to Manya. Risking his life, he hid loaves of bread for her under a bench, which she shared with her sisters.

During this time, Sally was awakened one night by a German guard standing over her shouting, “Where is the bread?” Sally showed her a piece of the rationed bread. “No, not that bread,” the guard yelled, slapping Sally so hard across her face that it remained swollen for several days. “Luckily, we had eaten all the bread,” Sally said.  

In mid-1944, Graeben became a subcamp of Gross Rosen, and life became harsher. 

Then, in late January or early February 1945, as the Russian army advanced, the Graeben inmates were forced to go on a death march. They walked day and night with no food, and those who fell or couldn’t walk were killed. The three sisters stuck together. “When one was weak, the other two put her in the middle and dragged her so she wouldn’t get shot,” Sally said. 

At one point they were transferred to open cattle cars, which were crowded and cold, bringing them to Bergen-Belsen during a huge typhus outbreak.

They were ordered to shower, given different clothes and were placed in a room where they sat crowded together. The next day, out in the yard, a Jewish kapo recognized Edzia. She then assigned the sisters jobs: Edzia and Manya sorted clothes, while Sally peeled potatoes. With these jobs came a place in a barracks. 

Soon after, however, Sally contracted typhus. Edzia enlisted two men to carry her to the hospital, giving them her bread ration for their effort. She was able to put Sally in the care of a woman they knew and trusted from Graeben.

One day, while outside the hospital to relieve herself, Sally fell onto a pile of corpses. “I felt something slimy,” she said. She could barely move, but somehow she mustered the strength to crawl away and return to the hospital. “Had I stayed there, I would have been cremated,” she said. 

Then, on April 15, 1945, British soldiers liberated the camp. For a long time after that, Sally cried for her mother. But “somehow the survivor instinct took over,” she said.

Shortly after liberation, Sally’s brother Simon showed up at Bergen-Belsen, and he brought Sally and her sisters to Hanover, Germany, where they lived in an apartment. The four siblings learned that their brothers Itzchak and Nathan also had survived, and they joined them at Buchenwald’s displaced persons camp. 

When the Russians took control of Buchenwald in July 1945, the siblings moved to the Landsberg displaced persons camp in Landsberg am Lech, near Munich. There, Sally was educated by private tutors, who taught her English, French and bookkeeping. The other siblings worked or studied. In 1947, Itzchak was killed in an automobile accident. 

Around 1949, they moved to Munich, where they ran a textile shop. In 1951, they immigrated to Melbourne, Australia, where they eventually opened a blouse factory. 

In 1957, while visiting New York with Nathan, Sally met an American, Steve Roisman, who was a friend of Nathan’s. Sally and Steve were married on June 13, 1959. 

The newlyweds settled in Australia, where their daughter Helen was born in 1960, followed by a second daughter, Roslyn, in 1963. In 1965, they relocated to Los Angeles, where Nathan and Edzia were then living. Steve was a businessman, buying and selling several liquor stores.

Helen died in a swimming pool accident in 1986, at 25. Sally and Steve’s granddaughter, Nicole, was born in 1989, and Steve died in 2009. Today, Edzia, at 92, is Sally’s only remaining sibling. “We talk every night,” Sally said.

In 1988, Sally took up painting, which continues to be a passion. She has exhibited her work at the Westside JCC and at the Pacific Art Guild in Los Angeles, and she has won many awards, including best of show. “My painting helps me so much,” she said. “I forget about everything, because one has to focus.” Many of her paintings depict biblical images, reminding her of her father in prewar times. 

Sally also serves as a judge for Chapman University’s annual Holocaust Art and Writing Contest for middle- and high-school students.

Over the years, she has told her story only a few times, always at a cost to her health, she said. But Sally does it for her family and in memory of the 6 million who perished. 

“I have an obligation, as long as I live, to tell the story about the Holocaust,” she said.