Sitbon, Stefania

Stefania Sitbon is a Holocaust Survivor from Poland.  She was born just before the war began, so Stefania doesn’t remember the German invasion, or life before the war.  The memories she has are of her childhood, a time when things had changed dramatically.  Stefania grew up in the chaos and hunger of the Warsaw Ghetto, where her father had taken up resistance against the Nazis – he later participated in the uprising, which he survived.  With the help of a righteous Gentile, Stefania and the other members of her family found temporary refuge in the Warsaw Zoo, the subject of the recent film The Zookeeper’s Wife.  From there Stefania and her family were separated and sent to convents and surrounding villages, from which they were liberated in 1945.  Her reunited family spent the immediate postwar years in Austria and Poland, after which they emigrated to the new nation of Israel, later deciding to go to Canada.