Holocaust Survivor Oral Histories

Sara Krieger was born in Warsaw, Poland in December of 1922 to Benyamin and Shindel Krieger. She grew up there with her older brother Pesach, older sister Toby (Jona), and younger sister Rachel. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they forced Sara and her family to move a small ghetto outside of Warsaw. Soon after, they forced Sara and her family to move to the Warsaw Ghetto, where Sara smuggled food for her family into the ghetto. Sara’s father, Benyamin, perished during that time. In 1941, Sara snuck out of the Warsaw Ghetto with her sister, Rachel, to work on farms in Polish villages. They pretended to be the children of non-Jewish Polish families and, under German-Nazi law, were sent to a torpedo factory in Eckernförde, Germany, where Sara worked as a driver. In spring of 1945, the British army liberated Eckernförde. Sara’s mother, Shindel, and sister Toby died during the war. Pesach, a member of the Polish army since the beginning of the war, died in combat.

When Sara searched for her family in displacement camps across Germany, she met Bernard Rosenthal, a German-Jewish Holocaust survivor. They married in June 1946 and lived in Germany, where their son was born. In 1950, they joined Rachel and her husband in Israel, and Sara’s second son was born. In October of 1960, Sara, her husband, and two sons immigrated to Baltimore, where her third child, a daughter, was born. Sara passed away on January 17, 2019.