Living in Many Worlds
featured:
Eva Flauster, daughter of holocaust surviors chune and genia flaster
september 22, 2023
Eva Flaster is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. Her father, Chune Flaster, was born in December of 1912 in Nowy Sacz, a city in the Carpathian Mountains of Poland. He loved the mountains and enjoyed the outdoors, skiing, and hiking. He lived at home with his mother and his two siblings until he enlisted in the Polish Army. When the Germans attacked, the Polish Army only lasted three weeks. The Poles disbanded, and he moved eastwards and was captured by the Russians who invaded Poland from the East. They sent him to a gulag in the frigid, frigid north of Russia. The Russians released him in 1941and he fought the Nazis for a second time.
Meanwhile, Eva’s mom, Genia Nordon, was born in Sosnowiec (Southwestern) Poland in 1924. She lived with her parents and three siblings. She was four days shy of her fifteenth birthday when the war began. The Nazis removed them from their home and forced them into a less desirable apartment. Life was exceedingly difficult, and food was scarce. Jews were no longer allowed to go to school. The family was moved one more time in1942. This time to a sealed ghetto.
From 1939 to 1942, Genia often hid her star with a purse and tried to barter for food for the family. In 1942, the Nazis captured her, and she became a slave laborer in a chemical plant. In January of 1945, the Nazis knew they were losing the war. They removed prisoners from the camps and took them on the “death march” to erase all evidence of the concentration camps. During the “death march,” Genia tried to escape by jumping from a moving train. The Nazis recaptured her, and she went through a series of prisons, and eventually, she wound up in the small fortress at Terezin.
Two years after the war, thanks to a family friend also living in the American sector of Germany, Chune and Genia met each other. They dated, got engaged and married in 1948. Eva was born the following year in the same Displaced Persons’ camp in Landsberg Am Lech.