Survivor-October 17, 2012
Our speaker, Bozenna Urbanowicz Gilbride, was born in 1934 to a Polish Catholic family on a farm near Leonowska, Poland (now in Ukraine). In September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded and incorporated eastern Poland, including Bozenna's village. The Urbanowicz's farm was made part of a collective under the Soviet communist government. Bozenna's father hid Jews in his shed during this period. In 1943, after Germany
seized the area, Bozenna and her family were shipped to Germany where they used as slave labor. Following the war, the family spent time in a Displaced Persons Camp, finally making it to the United States. In 2010, Bozenna Urbanowicz Gilbride and Inge Auerbacher wrote a book titled Children of Terror. This is the first book collaboratively written by a Polish Christian and a German Jewish survivor of the Holocaust about their Holocaust experiences during World War II.