Biography
Judy Weinstein (born Yehudit Wagner) is the daughter of Pinchos and Chana Wagner. She was born in April 9, 1932 in Rudnik, Poland, and her younger sister Charlotta (later Berler) was born on November 30, 1936. Pinchos and his two brothers, Michael and Avraham, owned a wicker factory, and they exported their products overseas. Avraham went to Palestine in the 1920s but returned to Poland after contracting malaria. He later immigrated to the United States and distributed the family's products in America. After start of war, in October 1939, Germans expelled all the Jews form Rudnik, including the extended Wagner family, across the river to Ulanow on the Russian side. Of Pinchos's siblings only his sister Kayla remained in Poland with her husband; they later perished in the Holocaust. The Wagners then went to Winicki near Lvov, but after a few months in spring 1940 the Soviets exiled the family to Siberia because they refused Soviet citizenship. They remained in Siberia for fourteen to sixteen months before being allowed to go south to the Ural Mountains and then to Kazakhstan. In the beginning of 1946 the Wagners were repatriated as Polish citizens and were taken to Bielawa in Lower Silesia. Six months later, they fled Poland with help of the Bricha. The traveled through Czechoslovakia to Austria where they stayed in a DP camp in Vienna for another six months. They then moved to the Wels DP camp where they lived until coming to America. Pinchos' brother Avraham provided them with affidavits, and on June 2, 1951 the family arrived in New York.
