We Remember Paula Lebovics
USC Shoah Foundation mourns the loss of Holocaust survivor and beloved friend of the Institute Paula Lebovics. She was 92 years old.
Lebovics was one of the 12 children standing behind the barbed wire of Auschwitz in a famous photo taken by the Soviet Army after liberation. By this time in history, Lebovics had experienced a ghetto, concentration camp, death camp and the permanent separation of her family – and she was only 12 years old.
Born in Ostrowiec, Poland, on Sept. 25, 1933, Paula was the youngest of six siblings and lived comfortably, surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. When Paula was just 6, the war began and her family was soon sent to an open ghetto with the rest of the town’s Jewish population. When one of her brothers learned a year and a half later that there would be a selection to send people to the Ostrowiec forced labor camp, Paula and her parents and siblings hid for several months, desperate to avoid capture.
After a year and a half in the Ostrowiec forced labor camp, Paula and her family were squeezed onto cattle cars on Aug. 1, 1944, and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Paula remembered sitting on her brother’s shoulders just to be able to get whiffs of fresh air above the adults’ heads in the packed car. She was 10 years old.
At Auschwitz, Paula became a favorite of the guard of her barrack, a young Jewish woman, by singing songs, and sometimes got extra food. Every day she witnessed beatings and killings, until the approaching Soviet Army triggered the Germans to send the majority of camp inmates on death. The Soviet Army reached the camp on Jan. 27, 1945, and only the children, elderly and sick were left behind.
After everything she had been through, it’s no surprise that Paula remembers a ragged Soviet soldier crying as he held her in his lap when he found her in the liberated camp. He offered her his own meager rations, and for the first time in a very long time, Paula felt that someone cared about her. “You mean somebody out there cares about me,” recalled Lebovics in her testimony she gave in 1995. “It was the first time I ever had this kind of feeling.”
Lebovics’ mother was liberated in Auschwitz and they reunited shortly after. They spent six years at a displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany. Lebovics’ father and two sisters were killed, but her three brothers survived and settled in Europe and Israel. When she was 18, Lebovics and her mother immigrated to Detroit. She met her husband, Michael, also a Holocaust survivor, and they married in 1957. They moved to Los Angeles and had two children, Dan and Linda, where they worked together in Michael’s jewelry business.
She spent her later years speaking to students about her experience and sharing her mantra, Silence is not an option. “I want students to learn tolerance,” said Lebovics. “To learn not to bully and not to hate.”
A long-time volunteer and friend of the Institute, Lebovics was involved in several different programs from education, communications and even fundraising. She even traveled on behalf of the Institute to Poland with students and educators for the Auschwitz: Past is Present program and also to Detroit, where she spoke at the 2015 Ambassadors for Humanity Gala. And every now and then Lebovics would just stop by the Institute to simply visit with staff, whom she called her friends.
“Whenever Paula spoke about her harrowing experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust, whether directly to students and educators or in her testimony, she captivated the listener with her warmth, strength, and optimism,” shared USC Shoah Foundation Senior Director of Administration, Jenna Leventhal.
“For those of us who were blessed to travel with Paula on commemorative study trips to Poland, we could see firsthand how she connected with young people and always imparted her mantra that ‘Silence is not an option.”