Janina Fischler-Martinho

Following the Nazi Occupation of Poland in World War II, Janina Fischler-Martinho and her family were forced into the Krakow Ghetto. At the age of 12, she began a small black market business selling scavenged goods to people on the outside of the Ghetto, and became the family’s chief breadwinner that way. In 1942, the family was split up when her parents and little sister were deported by the Germans and she and her older brother Joseph Fischler escaped the roundup. They fought desperately to stay alive. When the Nazis surrounded and liquidated the Ghetto in 1943, the siblings escaped by jumping through a manhole and traveling through the sewer to the other side of the city. Alone after they parted, she passed herself off as a Christian orphan and fended for herself for two years, tramping around the Polish countryside. Her brother survived the Plaszow forced labor camp and Mauthausen concentration camp, and they were reunited after the war. They eventually emigrated to the UK, and she married and became a teacher. Her memoir of the Holocaust, Have You Seen My Little Sister? was published in 1998.