- Biography
- Tuvia Erlich was born in the Eiggenfelden displaced persons camp on September 14, 1948 to parents Lea (Lola) Sheindla Leiblich (b. 1923 or 1924 in Krakow) and Zvi Herschel (b. 1917). Lea’s parents were Miriam Lieba (b. 1897 in Krakow, Poland) and Tobias (Tuvia) Elich (b. 1895 in Dabrowa, Poland), who were first cousins. Tobias had a store in Krakow and was observant. Lea had six younger siblings: Yisrael, Yehoshua (b. 1927), Sara Ita (b. 1929), Rosa (b. 1931), Hirsh Mendl (b.1933), and Yehudit (Judith, b. 1936).
Few details are known about their lives in the prewar and early wartime period, but it appears that Lea and her family members were forced into the Krakow ghetto, probably not long after it opened in March 1941. Lea was later deported to Auschwitz. Yehoshua was sent to the Plaszow concentration camp, and was among a group of nearly 1200 Jews who were saved from deportation through the intervention of Oskar Schindler, who arranged for protective status for them as workers in his enamelware factory in Krakow.
After the end of the war, Yehoshua moved to Israel, married, and changed his last name to Tsafrir. He was one of the founding members of Mishmar Hanegev Kibbutz. He believed that all of his siblings had perished in the Holocaust. In 2014, through the research of his daughter Iris Tsafrir and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum staff, he learned that his sister Lea (later "Lola") had survived the war and had immigrated to Israel. She had died in 1973, but through this discovery Yehoshua and Lea’s children were able to meet, nearly seventy years after the end of WWII.