United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Sylvia Kolski was born Sylvia Kramarska in 1925 in Tarczyn, Poland, to Mendel and Frymet Kramarski. She had three brothers, Moshe, Abraham, and Fishel. When the war started in 1939, she and her family relocated to the Warsaw ghetto. She worked in a tailor shop called Tebins and hid money in her clothing to protect herself from deportation until her father arranged for her escape. She and her father hid in a bunker with several other people in the Polish countryside until liberation in January 1945. She returned to Tarczyn before relocating to Łódź, where she met and married Abram Kolski. The couple moved to Paris in 1947 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. All three of her brothers were killed at Treblinka. Abram Kolski was born in 1917 in Izbica Lubelska, Poland, to Matys and Dorbys Kolski. He had two sisters and one brother. He relocated to the Czestochowa ghetto following the German invasion of Poland and performed forced labor at a metal factory. He was deported to Treblinka on October 2, 1942. At Treblinka he performed forced labor searching for valuables in the clothing of gas chamber victims. He participated in the Treblinka uprising on August 2, 1943, escaped the concentration camp during the uprising, and hid in a cellar of a home near Treblinka for the remainder of the war. Following liberation by the Russian Army. He met and married Sylvia Kramarska in Łódź, the couple moved to Paris in 1947, and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He testified about what he witnessed at Treblinka in the war crimes trials at Düsseldorf.
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The Sylvia and Abram Kolski photographs are arranged as a single series.
The Sylvia and Abram Kolski photographs document Sylvia and Abram Kolski and their families in Poland before and during the Holocaust and in France and the United States after World War II. Photographs depict Sylvia and Abram Kolski; Sylvia’s parents parents, brothers, and cousins; Frymet’s brother Abram Borenstein, her sister Laia Karpman, and their families; the individuals who hid with Sylvia and her father in a bunker in Krushev during the Holocaust; the Polish woman Bronislawa Witosinska who hid them; the Pogorzelski family who hid Abram Kolski following the Treblinka uprising; and two men who participated in the uprising with Abram. Additional photographs depict school children and Zionist youth in Tarczyn before the Holocaust and memorial erected after the Holocaust.
Sylvia and Abram Kolski photographs