Lucy Lipiner papers

The Lucy Lipiner papers includes mounted photographs with captions indicating they depict the brewery where the Sucha ghetto was located and the deportation of Jews from Sucha to Auschwitz in 1942; a photocopy of a list of people in Sucha who made charitable donations, including Lipiner’s grandmother Frymet Mandelbaum; a photocopy of a detailed typewritten account in Polish of what happened to the Jews and Polish Partisan sin Sucha and the surrounding area during the war; and two lists of students who attended Jewish religious classes in the Austro-Hungarian school system in 1909-1910 and 1916-1917. Lipiner received the materials from a young man interested in the pre-war Jewish population of Sucha when she visited her hometown in 1996. Lucy Lipiner (nee Sara Mandelbaum) was born in Sucha, Poland (now Sucha Beskidzka) in 1933 to Abaraham and Rose Mandelbaum. Her father made a plan to leave Sucha and led a group of fourteen out of town the day that World War II broke out in September 1939. Heading east in a horse and wagon, it took them three months to reach the Soviet Union. One of the women in the group gave birth in December 1939. In the USSR, they stayed in huts until June 1940 when the group was deported to a labor camp in Siberia. When Stalin allowed the foreigners to leave Siberia in 1941, Lucy’s father obtained a permit, and the group went south to Central Asia. They remained there for five years. Everyone in the group of fourteen survived, except one 30-year-old cousin. Lucy’s family wasn’t allowed to return to Poland until her father obtained a permit to leave the Soviet Union in 1946. They traveled in a boxcar for six weeks. They arrived in Krakow and tried to find their family members. When her father learned that his brother had been shot in 1942 (by someone who wanted his house), he wanted to find and kill the man, but her mother dissuaded him. Lucy’s mother lost her entire family. The Lipiner family immigrated to the United States in 1949.