Yona was the eldest of four children in a working-class Jewish family.  The family lived in the Jewish section of Pabianice.  Yona’s father sold merchandise to Polish stores.  When the Poles could not pay him for his goods, they would give him food for his family.  It was a difficult life in Pabianice, but Yona’s family was very close, and many relatives lived nearby.

1933-39: After war began in September 1939, the Germans set up a ghetto in Pabianice in Yona’s neighborhood.  All her extended family was moved to the ghetto.  They suffered because there wasn’t enough food.  Every week the Gestapo came and confiscated more of their valuables.  Then they began seizing people–every few weeks they took people either for work or to concentration camps.  They never knew if they’d see each other again at the end of the day.

1940-44: In May 1942 the Pabianice ghetto was emptied.  Yona, her sister and her father were deported to the Lodz ghetto.

She was 12 and was sent to work in a factory with her little sister.

 

Members of the extended Rosenthal Vigotska family at a Purim celebration. Among those pictured is Yona Wygocka Dickmann.

For two years they sewed clothes, hiding when the Germans began deporting Jews from Lodz.  In August 1944, they were sent to Auschwitz, where they faced selection.  Yona was sent to work in an airplane factory in Germany and her sister was sent to die.  When the Americans began bombing, she was put on a train for the Mauthausen camp.

After 10 days with little food and no water, Yona was liberated in Mauthausen by the Americans.  After the war she joined an uncle in Israel and eventually settled in America.

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• Yona’s story from USHMM Survivor Volunteers

• >> PDF of the story mural tile display, designed by Bruce Vogel