- Biography
- Helen Abraham (born Hencia Wagner, 1923-2014) was born on 12 May 1923 in the village of Dabrowica Mala, Galicia, Poland to Yehudit Zimmerman Wagner (1886?-1942) and Meyer Wax Wagner (1885?-1935). She had three older brothers, Aaron, Mendel, and David. Her father Meyer worked as a farmer and died in 1935 from an accident.
After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Wagners lost their farm and became forced-laborers for another farm in the village. In 1941 her brother Mendel fled to Russia and presumably perished there. In 1942 her mother died of pneumonia and her brother Aaron was killed by the Gestapo. Helen and David were then sent to Tarnogród ghetto. In the fall, Helen, David, and their cousin Jacob Blumenfeld escaped from the ghetto right before it was liquidated on 25 November 1942. David went into hiding in Poland, but was eventually found and killed. Helen obtained false documents and travelled to Kraków, Poland posing as a Polish Catholic. She found work in a munitions factory in Menden, Germany. She befriended a Polish girl named Carolina Wilk, who knew Helen’s secret and helped her conceal her identity.
After the war, Helen went to the Ainring displaced persons camp. She immigrated to the United States on the SS Ernie Pyle on 3 January 1947 from Bremen, Germany. She settled in Brooklynwith her American cousins Rose and Mitchell London. Through a mutual survivor friend, Henry Fladell, she met her husband William Abraham. They married in 1948 and had three children, Judy, Michael, and Marsha.
