Zosia Goldberg (1918–2010)

Zosia Goldberg was a young Jewish woman living in Warsaw, Poland, when Nazi Germany invaded her country in 1939 at the start of World War II. She escaped the Warsaw Ghetto through the city sewers and evaded capture by posing as a Catholic Pole. It helped that she spoke Polish like a Pole and had attended mostly non-Jewish schools. She estimated that she faced life or death situations 49 times, and survived. After the war, Zosia emigrated to the USA, where she married, then moved to Caracas, Venezuela, to operate a garment business. She returned to the USA after her husband's death to be closer to her son. Her memoir Running Through Fire: How I Survived the Holocaust (2004) was transcribed from interviews conducted over 25 years by her nephew Hilton Obenzinger, a writer and poet. Paul Auster provided a foreword.