Wanda Rotbart papers

Wanda Rotbart (formerly Natka Kronenberg and Wanda Levenkopf), was born to Moishe and Chava Kronenberg in Warsaw, Poland where Moishe worked as a furrier. There, she attended school until the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, when she had to suspend her education during her second year of high school. A year later in 1940, Wanda and her family moved into the Warsaw Ghetto. 1942 Wanda’s mother and sister were deported to Treblinka. Wanda evaded capture at this time by hiding in a large pot used for washing laundry. After that, Wanda fled the other side of the ghetto, where she hid in a bunker in her uncle’s basement. She was eventually captured by Nazi forces after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 and was transported to Majdanek, concentration camp in Poland. There she stayed briefly until she was sent to work in a factory in Skarżysko-Kamienna. While in Skarżysko-Kamienna, Wanda worked in a HASAG (also known as Hugo Schneider AG) munitions factory, first cleaning rust off grenades and then assembling bullets. Around 1944, Wanda was sent to Leipzig-Schönefeld, then a sub-camp of Buchenwald and worked in a different HASAG munitions factory, until she was liberated in 1945. After liberation, Wanda stayed in Breslau, Germany, where she worked for the government and then in a brewery. She eventually obtained a transit visa to go to Stockholm, Sweden and then Brazil with the help of her friend Lily Levenkopf, whom she knew from Warsaw and with whom she had stayed for the duration of the Holocaust. Wanda stayed in Rio de Janeiro for many years and became a dressmaker. In 1953, immigrated to the United States with the help of a customer who she was making dresses for at the time. She stayed briefly in New York City and then moved to Chicago, where she had family. Wanda lost her entire family in the Holocaust.