Dorit Mandelbaum was born on June 2, 1946 in the Landsberg DP camp to Jakub Mandelbaum (1914-1993) and Anka Aleksandrowicz Mandelbaum (1918-1998). Jakub Mandelbaum was born on March 2, 1914, in Kozienice to Izak and Dora Mandelbaum. He studied in a commerce school and later became a dental technician. In 1935 he became a sales clerk in a radio shop. Jakub met his future wife, Anka, during her stay in Kozienice while visiting her sister, Róża Aleksandrowicz. Anka was born on June 6, 1918, in Warsaw to Hena and Szlomo Aleksandrowicz. In 1940 Anka and her family were forced into the Warsaw ghetto. Jakub made a special trip to Warsaw to convince Anka to flee. In 1941 Anka escaped the Warsaw ghetto only to be immediately arrested and put in prison. She managed to jump out of a bathroom window of the prison and flee. Anka walked all the way to Kozienice, and on the last leg of a journey she was helped by an elderly Pole who pretended to be her father and helped her to board a boat across the Vistula River to Kozienice. Soon after her arrival, Anka and Jakub married.
In 1942 Jakub was transferred to a forced labor camp in Wolanów, near Radom, where some one thousand Jewish prisoners worked on an airfield. In August 1943 Jakub was transferred to the Bliżyn (Blizin) forced labor camp near Końskie, where he worked in carpentry and posed as a Pole. In July 1944 Jakub was taken to the Golleschau (Goleszów) forced labor camp, a sub-camp of Monowitz and employed by Steinbruch. In January 1945 he was transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp where he was in a Strasse Kommando. On May 5, 1945 the United States Army liberated the camp, and Jakub Mandelbaum returned to Kozienice to search for his family. During the years of his imprisonment Jakub hid his family photographs in his shoe.
Anka was deported from the Kozienice ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau where she worked in the ammunition factory until its liberation in January 1945. Jakub’s father, Izak Mandelbaum, survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where he worked as a barber. All the other family members perished.
Jakub and Anka Mandelbaum left Poland for Germany. They spent five years in the Landsberg DP camp, where their only daughter, Dorit, was born in 1946. In 1950 the family immigrated to Israel, but after a few years they returned to Europe, and in 1957 they settled in the United States. Jakub died in 1993, and Anka died in 1998. Dorit Mandelbaum resides in New York City.
