THE 20 CHILDREN

Lea Klygerman

Lea (or Lola) Klygerman was born in Ostrowiec, 60 kilometers south of Radom in Poland on 28 April 1937. She and her mother Ester and her sister Rifka, two years her junior, were deported at the beginning of August 1944 from the forced labor camp in Ostrowiec to Auschwitz Concentration Camp. They arrived there on 3 August. Lea was tattooed with the number A-16959. Lea’s father Berek Klygermanwas deported from Bliżyn camp, south of Radom, to Auschwitz. From there he was taken in October 1944 to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, and later transferred to Buchenwald. He died there in February 1945. Lea Klygerman was brought to Neuengamme Concentration Camp on 28 November 1944 and murdered here in Bullenhuser Damm on 20 April 1945.

Ester Klygerman survived and returned to Poland. Her search for her daughters Lea and Rifka was unsuccessful. In the 1970s Ester Klygerman emigrated to Israel. There she remarried and had another daughter, Amalia. Through relatives of one of the other murdered children, Amalia found out about the fate of the elder of the sisters, Lea Klygerman. But in order to protect her mother, she did not tell her about it.