December 23, 2024
Rescuer & Political Prisoner Survivor Vera Laska | Women’s History Month | USC Shoah Foundation

Rescuer & Political Prisoner Survivor Vera Laska | Women’s History Month | USC Shoah Foundation

Author: USC Shoah Foundation via YouTube
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Rescuer & Political Prisoner Survivor Vera Laska | Women’s History Month | USC Shoah Foundation

“I should write about the women – Nobody’s writing about the women.”

Holocaust survivor and hero, Dr. Vera Laska, was born in Kosice, Czechoslovakia in 1928. Vera was not Jewish, but had many Jewish friends. Vera joined the resistance when she and her friend, both expert skiers, agreed to lead two men who lacked proper identification papers from Slovakia to Hungary. Over the next several years, Vera made about a dozen such trips, leading political and Jewish refugees as part of an underground railroad from Slovakia to Hungary to Yugoslavia and beyond.

In spring of 1943, Vera was arrested after being caught with false papers that she had used during her trips across the border. After being jailed in her hometown for about a month, Vera was deported to Auschwitz II-Birkenau as a political prisoner. She was later sent to the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp, where she was forced to work in a tunnel, measuring parts used in the German V-2 missile program. Her task was to divide the good rings from the bad, but she sabotaged the contents by arbitrarily dividing the parts. In March 1945, Vera escaped a death march by hiding in a barn for four days until the war had ended.

Read more about Vera at https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2018/03/21461-incredible-woman-vera-laska-joined-czech-resistance-saved-jewish-lives-teenager.

March is Women’s History Month in the United States.

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