Mania and Blima
from Memories From Miedzyrzec
in The Last Address
by Leslie Starobin
When these two sisters visited a Polish photography studio around 1925, they had no inkling of the darkness to come. The older girl, Blima Zauberman, was lost in the Holocaust, but Mania Zauberman escaped by fleeing to the Soviet Union with the Red Army. Mania's daughter, Jamie Benado Kotler, tells us: "My mother never talked about the war, and when my grandmother tried to speak, my mother made her stop. I know so little about their wartime experiences. I know with certainty that the Nazis murdered my aunt Blima, along with her husband, a political cartoonist, and their baby boy, whose name no one ever mentioned. It is likely that they were murdered in the first Aktion, August 25-26, 1942. Blima would have been only 20."
