Victory
Sonia Weitz was a young teenager in Poland when, in 1941, she and her family were forced to enter the Kraków ghetto. Her mother was taken from the ghetto and sent to the Belzec death camp, where she was killed. In 1943, Sonia, her older sister Blanca, and their father were sent to Płaszów, a slave labor camp south of Kraków.
During this time, Weitz kept a diary and wrote poetry. After the Holocaust, she continued to write as a way to cope with her emotions in the aftermath of the intense trauma she had experienced. In her book I Promised I Would Tell, she writes:
Although men and women lived in separate parts of the camp, the two groups did manage to have contact with each other. For example, on one occasion I was sent to the ghetto with a cleanup detail. While there I found a jacket, a precious warm jacket. I smuggled it back to Płaszów to my father. It was comforting to think that the jacket would keep him warm that winter. On another day, I sneaked into my father’s barracks on the other side of the barbed wire fence. While I was there, I met a boy who was about my age—14 or 15. The boy was playing a harmonica, an offence punishable by death. My father and I listened to the music, and my father said to me, “You and I never had a chance to dance together” . . . and so we danced. It is such a precious image, a bizarre and beautiful gift.