Bracha Plotnik photograph collection

Bracha Plotnik (born Bracha Chmielnicka, 1920-2003) was born on April 2, 1920, in Będzin, Poland to Dov Aleksander Chmielnicki and Ester Fajner Chmielnicka. She had three siblings: Ada (b. 1921), Szymon (b. 1923), and Różka (b. 1925). The family continued to live in their apartment on 41 Kołła̜taja Street in Będzin for the first two and a half years of World War II. In May 1941 they were forced into the Będzin ghetto in Poland, and settled on Landerweg (Długa) Street. From 1940 to August 1943, Bracha took part in the kibbutz hachshara "Farma" established on a piece of land between Kamionka and Środula, Poland. In August 1943, during the liquidation of the ghetto, Bracha was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. She was imprisoned there until the evacuation of Auschwitz on January 17, 1945 when she was transferred to a series of concentration and labor camps including Gross-Rosen, Ravensbrück, Malchow, Leipzig, Dresden, and Görlitz. Bracha was 25 years old when she was liberated by American troops on April 26, 1945. Soon after her liberation, Bracha was sent by a Zionist youth movement to Warsaw, Poland, to organize an evacuation of Jewish children from the Świe̮tego Jezusa orphanage. Along with Yehuda Szulman, a representative from Palestine, Bracha accompanied almost one thousand orphans to Palestine. In April 1946, they sailed aboard the SS Champollion from Marseilles, France. Bracha settled in Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon. Her sister, Ada Blacharz, the only other surviving member of the Chmielnicki family, also settled in Israel.