Survivor Hersh Portnoy holds up a photograph of his daughter Matle who perished during the war.
Overview
- Caption
- Survivor Hersh Portnoy holds up a photograph of his daughter Matle who perished during the war.
- Date
-
1946
- Locale
- Munich, [Bavaria] Germany
- Variant Locale
- Muenchen
- Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Fanya Szuster Portnoy
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumProvenance: Fanya Szuster Portnoy
Keywords & Subjects
Administrative Notes
- Biography
- Fanya Portnoy (born Fanya Szuster) and her twin sister, Freida, were born in Vilna on December 3, 1914. They had an older sister Ezbetz. On September 6, 1941 Fanya was forced to move into the Vilna ghetto. Ezbetz was later shot to death in Ponary. Fanya remained in the ghetto for two years, and on September 23, 1943, was deported to the Kaiserwald concentration camp outside of Riga. She was put to work preparing fuel shipments. There she met Katia Magid, and the two female prisoners became fast friends who remained together for the rest of the war. In 1944 the women were transferred to Toren, a subcamp of Stutthof. There, Fanya worked in the AIG factory. After their liberation by the Soviet Army, Fanya and Katia escaped to the town of Bydgoszcz, where they were nursed back to health by a Russian doctor named Nisenevitch. Fanya and Katia immigrated to the United States in January 1947 but were only allowed to remain for eight months due to the U.S. immigration quotas. They travelled to Cuba in the hope of receiving proper documents after six weeks, but instead were stranded for over three years. They finally returned to the United States in March 1951. Fanya later married Hersh Portnoy (b. 1909), a fellow Jewish survivor from Odessa, who had survived the war in the Soviet army but lost his wife and children (Matle, Esther and Neche).
- Record last modified:
- 2004-04-19 00:00:00
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1146540
