Once, Her Name was Sara

Monday, January 27, 2025, was the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz. According to the Auschwitz/Birkenau Memorial and Museum, “Until the liberation of some 7 thousand prisoners remaining at the site of the camp by soldiers of the Red Army, the German Nazis murdered approx. 1.1 million people in Auschwitz, mostly Jews, but also Poles, the Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and people of other nationalities.”  More than one million of those murdered were children.

Early in my career in the insurance industry, I was blessed to work beside a woman named Seena Schwarz. Seena was a Holocaust survivor, one of the thousands of children who survived because they were hidden – their identities were disguised, and they were concealed from the outside world. This is Seena’s story:

Seena was born Sara Stolniki in Antwerp, Belgium in 1931. The Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940, but the horrors of the Holocaust did not affect the Stolniki family until 1942, when Sara was nearly 10. A family friend offered to hide Sara and her older sister Gutki in an orphanage. Sara became very ill, and when she awoke, she found herself in a convent. There were 13 other Jewish girls. The priests took in the boys. Sara’s sister was about 20 at the time and volunteered at the convent, acting as a substitute mother to the frightened girls. Two weeks after Sara was moved to the orphanage, her father Judel was arrested and shipped to Auschwitz, where he died.

Auschwitz Death Certificates 1942 – 1943

Stolnicki  Judel
1889-07-12  -  1942-10-19
Rajgrod  Brüssel  Jew  

Sara’s mother, Ginendel, was hidden on a nearby farm, and the girls saw her only occasionally as she stood at the edge of the woods near the convent. The girls remained in the convent from October 1942 to May 1943, when neighbors betrayed them to the Nazis. The nuns baptized Sara and three other girls and hid them while the Nazis invaded the convent. Fearing for the children, the nuns reached out to the underground, who arrived the next night. They tied up the nuns to make it look like they were not involved and took the children.

Sara and her sister were bounced to different hiding places until they found safety in another convent until the liberation in 1944. In an article entitled Woven Together, Seena explained, “The people who hid us were part of a whole network. The people kept records. They knew when the day came that the war was over and the parents would come looking for them, they needed to be able to find them. The lists were split into two books - each went with a different person so that no one could collect all the names. Sara returned to Brussels and was finally reunited with her mother in 1948 when they emigrated to the US.

Sara found comfort in the church, but she always knew she was Jewish. After she arrived in New York, a cousin suggested she change her name to Seena. Seena saw this new name as a blessing because, during the war, all Jewish women had been tagged as Sara and the men as Isaac.

After hearing her story, I wrote an article about Seena for our company newsletter in October 1990. In early 1991, I read an article about an upcoming convention planned in New York in May for the “Hidden Children” of the Holocaust. I told Seena about the convention. Initially, she was not interested in reliving her worst nightmare, but as time went by, she decided to attend. This was a turning point in Seena’s life. After attending the convention and meeting up with old friends, including one of the nuns from the convent, she became a key speaker about children hidden during the Holocaust, lecturing at schools and other venues. There is a transcript of her time as a Hidden Child in the Holocaust Museum. Seena died in 2015.

Her husband, Bernie, struggled with his memories of the war for many years. His entire family was sent to a concentration camp in France in 1940, but he was smuggled out two years later. A non-Jewish family hid him for the remainder of the occupation. Seena finally convinced him to return to France, where he reunited with the family that hid him. In her Holocaust Museum transcript, she confided:

The OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants—Society for the Aid of Children) saved her husband in France. He ended up in a small town south of France near Limoges. From 1943 to 1946, local farmers took him in until he came to the United States. Mrs. Schwartz wrote to Yad Vashem and asked that the farmers be recognized as “Righteous Gentiles.” She has a message: “To be good to each other; we are our brother’s keeper.”

-Eileen Brogan