Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

In March, 1942, all girls of Bardejov, aged up to 25, were ordered to gather in a school.
Zanne Farbstein and her two sisters, Edith and Sarah, were escorted by their father, who gave each of them a corona coin as a good-luck amulet.
They joined a thousand other girls on the first transport to Auschwitz.

After several months, Zanne Farbstein and her sisters, Edith and Sarah, were sent to the newly built Birkenau camp, where they endured hard labor, hunger and disease.
Zanne survived the selektions because of her Aryan looks, and managed to obtain the “desirable” jobs of sorting confiscated clothes and other possessions.

Edith Farbstein, sick and exhausted, suggested exchanging her good shoes for Zanne’s threadbare shoes, and after that, Zanne and Sarah never saw Edith again.

On January 18, 1945, the women prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camp were sent on a death march to Germany.
Zanne Farbstein had to support Sarah through the snow and rain.
When the German guards abandoned the prisoners in a small town, the two sisters continued on to the American Zone, where they found soldiers from the Jewish Brigade.

Norbert Wollheim was was put on a forced march to Gleiwitz.

Of the 6,000 prisoners who began the forced march from Monowitz, only 2,000 remained alive when the train arrived in Berlin, on January 31, 1945.

On January 25, 1945, the prisoners who left Auschwitz on January 18, 1945, on the Death March, arrived in Mauthausen.