Minna Aspler papers

Minna Aspler (1918 or 1922-2018) was born Minna Friedland in Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro), Ukraine on June 9, 1918 to Shlomo Mendle Friedland and Feiga Shivski Friedland (an ID card lists her birth year as 1922). Her brother, Baruch, was born in 1924. The Russians considered her businessman father to be “bourgeois,” so he moved to Warsaw to reestablish his business, and she and her mother moved to Vilna, where her brother, Baruch, was born in 1924. They later rejoined her father in Warsaw. During World War II they were imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto. On June 22, 1942 Minna escaped the ghetto with the help of her Christian friend, Henryk Krueger. With a priest’s help, she obtained a false identity card using the birth certificate of a dead child. She worked in a library under the assumed name Maria Burczysk. During the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, the library’s basement was turned into a first aid station, and Minna helped bandage the wounded, delivered messages to the outside, and searched burning buildings for anyone who was trapped inside. In 2016, the Polish government awarded Aspler the Pro Patria medal for her heroic acts. Minna was liberated by the American Army on May 4, 1945 in Wahlwinkel, Germany. She moved to the Landsberg DP camp, married its deputy director, Moe Aspler, from Montreal, and moved home to Canada with him. The couple had twins, Carl and Fanya. None of her immediate family survived the Holocaust. In 1987 Yad Vashem honored Henryk Krueger as Righteous Among the Nations.