Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

Miriam Weinfeld Yakubovitz cites her mother, Bronia 'Braindel' Plessner Weinfeld, date of birth as November 26, 1899, in the Yad vaShem Page of Testimony.

In March 1941, Hirsch Weinfeld, his wife, Bronia, and children, Rela-Lusia, Miriam and Izio, were transported to the Kraków ghetto Getto krakowskie. where the family shared a small apartment with 20 other people.
The authorities confiscated Hirsch Weinfeld's business and part of the apartment, where they installed two Germans.

By May 1940, the Nazi occupation authority announced that Kraków should become the "cleanest" city in the General Government, an occupied, but unannexed part of Poland.
They ordered deportation of Jews from the city, and of the more than 68,000 Jews in Kraków when the Germans invaded, only 15,000 workers and their families were permitted to remain.
All other Jews were ordered out of the city, to be resettled into surrounding rural areas.

On March 3, 1941, the Kraków Ghetto Getto krakowskie was formally established in the Podgórze district, not in the Jewish district of Kazimierz. Displaced Polish families from Podgórze took up residences in the former Jewish dwellings outside the newly established Ghetto.
15,000 Jews were crammed into an area previously inhabited by 3,000 people who used to live in a district that consisted of 30 streets, 320 residential buildings, and 3,167 rooms.
The Kraków Ghetto Getto krakowskie was surrounded by walls that separated it from the rest of the city.
All windows and doors that gave onto the Aryan side were ordered bricked up.
There were 4 guarded entrances allowed traffic to pass through.

In November, 1942, Hirsch Weinfled sent his daughter, Miriam, age 15 years, and her brother, Izio to Lwów to look for refuge.
Izio Weinfeld helped people in the Lwów Ghetto, providing false identity cards, but he was captured by the Gestapo and was never seen again.
Miriam was left alone in Lwów, so she returned to her family to the Kraków Ghetto.

On May 30, 1942, the Nazis began systematic deportations from the Kraków Ghetto Getto krakowskie to surrounding concentration camps. Thousands of Jews were transported as part of the Aktion Krakau headed by SS-Oberführer Julian Scherner.
Jews were assembled on Zgody Square first and marched to the railway station in Prokocim.
The first transport consisted of 7,000 people, and the second transport consisted of 4,000 Jews, deported to Belzec extermination camp on 5 June 1942.

On March 13-March 14, 1943 the final liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto Getto krakowskie, carried out under the command of SS-Untersturmführer Amon Göth. in which 8,000 Jews deemed able to work were transported to the Plaszow labor camp, while those deemed unfit for work, approximately 2,000 Jews, were killed in the streets of the ghetto.
Remaining were sent to Auschwitz.

Rela-Lusia and Miriam Weinfled were sent to the Płaszów concentration camp, a forced labor camp, supplying work force to several German factories, where the 3 small cousins, whom Miriam took care of after their parents were sent to their deaths, were murdered immediately.

In 1944, Bronia Weinfeld and her daughters, Miriam and Rela-Lusia, were transported to Auschwitz concentration camp.

Bronia Weinfeld and her daughters, Miriam and Rela-Lusia, were interned at Auschwitz concentration camp until January, 1945, when they were forced to walk in the death march to Bergen-Belsen

In January, 1945, tens of thousands of prisoners in Auschwitz concentration camp were forced marched to Bergen-Belsen, for nearly two weeks in harsh weather, and many of them died on the way.
Miriam Weinfeld and her sister, Rela-Lusia, survived, but theri mother, Bronia, could not take it any longer and died a few days before the camp was liberated by the British Army, on April 15, 1945.

Miriam Weinfeld cites, regarding the liberation of Bergen Belsen, "I myself was lying on a heap of dead bodies and beside me was my sister Lusia, our mother was there with us, but she was no longer alive. For her, the war ended too late... Sweden chose the weakest and sickest. Nothing was demanded of us. They sanitised us... dressed us, checked us, fed us vitamins and cod liver oil and sent us to pretty localities, most of us to hospitals."