Celia Lederman
Title: Becoming Celia: The Story of Haftling 46996Author: Celia Lederman
Publisher: Makor Jewish Community Library
Place of publication: Melbourne, Australia
Year of Publication: 2011
Location of Book: LAMM Jewish Library of Australia
Cities/town/camps: Poland - Warsaw, Otwock, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Death march; Post war - Sweden – Ronneby, Malmo; France – Paris; Australia - Melbourne
Becoming Celia: The Story of Haftling 46996 is the memoir of Holocaust survivor Celia Lederman. The book is divided into three main sections – pages 1-18 deal with Celia’s life in Poland before the war; pages 20-46 describe the war years, including her incarceration in Warsaw ghetto, Majdanek and Auschwitz and the last part of the book (pages 59-134) portrays Celia’s new life in Melbourne.
Cipora (Cesia in Polish and Celia in English) was born in Warsaw on 16 July 1927, the third of five children to Sara and Yossel Ofnagel. The religious family spoke Yiddish at home. Mr Ofnagel was a respected elder of the Jewish community. Celia attended the Beth Yaacov School until the age of twelve. Every summer, the family went to Otwock for holidays.
The German army arrived in Warsaw in September 1939 and by October 1940, the family (2 adults and 9 children) moved into a small flat on Zamenhofa St in the Warsaw ghetto. A few months later, Celia and her brother Laibl were sent to work on a Polish farm near Warsaw, where they harvested crops, cleaned the diary and did maintenance until April 1943. Upon their return to Warsaw ghetto, the siblings discovered they were they only members left alive. The rest of the family had been deported to Treblinka where they were murdered. In April 1943, Laibl and Celia were packed into cattle trains and sent to Majdanek.
Conditions in Majdanek were terrible – the ‘prisoners’ slept in bunks and there were rats running everywhere. Celia’s work included loading corpses onto carts, performing useless tasks such as dragging stones from one place to another. Roll call every morning lastedfor hours on end, there were constant selektions, typhus outbreaks and they suffered at the hands of the brutal Kapos. Ten months later, she was herded into a cattle car with other Jewish prisoners and sent to Auschwitz.
In Auschwitz, Celina was tattooed with the number 46996. She worked as a slave labourer in various factories outside the camp – knitting woollen berets and gloves for German soldiers and making small parts for airplanes. For 12-14 months Celia managed to survive the selektions and beatings. In the winter of 1945 as the Russian soldiers approached Auschwitz, Celia and the remaining prisoners were evacuated on a death march. The prisoners marched for weeks until the Swedish Red Cross liberated the starving and exhausted survivors.
After recuperating in a Swedish sanitarium, Celia worked in a factory in Malmo. She discovered her beloved brother Laibl had also survived. An Australian cousin sponsored Celia and she arrived in Sydney around Christmas, 1946. Celia’s early years in Australia were very difficult as her adopted family treated Celia like a domestic servant. When Laibl arrived in 1949, he helped Celia find alternative accommodation. On 26 August 1950, Celia married Peter Lederman and they had two daughters, Sandra and Anne.
Celia’s book is broken up into short chapters and reads like a dairy. There are about 26 pages of family photographs in this novel, which is easy to read as Celia’s positive nature permeates throughout.