United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Roza Holcman was born to Abraham Chaim and Liza Lea Rosenberg Holcman on July 21, 1910, in Czerwińsk nad Wisłą, Poland. Roza was a lawyer. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Roza and her mother fled Plock and headed east to the Crimea in the Soviet Union. Roza did work for the Polish Government in Exile which was based in London and was represented by underground delegates. Roza tried to enlist soldiers into the Polish Home Army in the east. In 1942, she was arrested and was sentenced to fifteen years in a Soviet labor camp in Samarka, Kazakhstan. It was there in 1943 that she met Phillip Rosenblith, an American dentist who served as a medic. He was later taken to Moscow where he was killed. Roza had a daughter, Aurelia Holcman, who was born at the camp on November 21, 1944. Her mother, Liza, was able to get a permit from the NKVD, the Soviet security service, signed by Molotov, to take the baby out of the camp when she was 11 months old. They went to Moscow and in 1946, returned to Poland. Roza was released from the camp in 1955, and joined Liza and Aurelia in Warsaw.
folder 1
The papers consist of eight photographs documenting the experiences of Roza Holcman and Liza Rozenberg Holcman during World War II. Also included in the papers is a notebook kept by Roza Holcman from 1942 to 1945 while she was interned in a Soviet labor camp and in which she wrote dates and historical facts.
Holcman family papers