Falik family papers

Leon Ari Falik (born Mordche Lieb, 1908-1999) was born in Brzeżany, Poland (now Berezhany, Ukraine) to Moses Joseph and Bina Falik. He had one sister, Deborah, and one brother, Eli. Leon studied medicine in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and Warsaw, Poland. He worked in Warsaw until 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. He fled to Russia and was inducted into the Red Army. He was a Chief Abdominal Surgeon until 1943 when he was transferred to the Polish Army into the same position. He remained in the Polish Army until 1947, after which he worked as a gynecologist in two displaced persons camps in Berlin, Germany. He immigrated to the United States in 1948, and settled in New York. He co-founded an organization in New York called Tribute to the Danes and Other Rescuers in 1966. Giza Sternschuss Falik (1915-?) was born in Rakow-Kat, Tarnopol, Poland (now Ternopil’, Ukraine) to Regina (d. 1942) and Yehuda Wolf Sternschuss (d. 1942). She had one brother, Izrael (1911-1942), and one sister, Malka Yenta (later Mildred Stern, 1913-?). Giza was married to Fred Felner prior to the war, and worked as a physician. During the war, she worked in a clinic in Tarnopol until 1941 when she fled the Nazis and became a partisan hiding in the forests near the Zbruch River. She then went to the Ural mountains where she worked in a kitchen and as a nurse until they were liberated in 1945. She and Leon married during the war. She immigrated to the United States in 1947. Mildred Stern left Tarnopol and immigrated to the United States in 1937, and joined the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in 1943. After the war, she was in Germany with the WAC from 1946-1948.