Gift of Aviva F. Blumberg
Id no. 201.96, Photograph
Awiwa Finkelstejn with her father, Chaim Finkelstejn, in New York in 1946. Awiwa was born in Warsaw in 1931.Chaim Finkelstejn was in Switzerland attending The World Zionist Congress when the war started in 1939, was unable to return to Poland, and ended up in USA in 1940. Awiwa and the rest of her family remained in Warsaw.
In November 1940, the Nazis established the Warsaw Ghetto, a segregated district where Jews from the city and the surrounding areas were forced to live under deplorable conditions. Just before the first Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in January 1943, Awiwa hid in the home of a non-Jewish woman, where she survived the war. She immigrated to the United States after the war, where she reunited with her father in November 1945. Her mother and sister were murdered in the Holocaust.