The SAJBD mourns the passing of Holocaust Survivor Mascha Schainberg. We got to know Mascha when she travelled to Poland in 2015 to represent South Africa at the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz. She was a true inspiration to all who met her. We extend our condolences to the her family. Below is a tribute from the SAJBD’s Yom Hashoa’s 2015 commemoration.
I was absolutely devastated to learn about the passing of Holocaust Survivor, Mascha Shainberg. I met Mascha a couple of years ago, when she was our guest at the 2015 Yom Hashoa Ceremony. Her daughter, Doris Krinsky shared Mascha’s story with us.
Mascha was born in Bialystok Poland, she was the youngest of four sisters. When she was twelve years old, she and her family were confronted at their home by soldiers thrusting rifles in their faces and herded into a cramped boxcar train with hundreds of other fellow Jews. After two days without food or water, they arrived at what she described as ‘the living hell’ of Auschwitz, largest and most infamous of the Nazi death camps. They were immediately put into lines for selection. Mascha and her sisters were sent to the right, their mother to the left. And in that moment, Mascha’s mother knew what lay ahead, and she clung desperately to her four girls before an SS guard hit her over the head with his rifle. Mascha’s last memory of her mother was seeing her being carried away bleeding into the back of a cattle truck. Later that day, she and her sisters saw a large black cloud of smoke coming out of two chimneys. There was an awful stench of burning human flesh in the air. Without understanding why they knew that their mother was up those chimneys – gassed and cremated together with all the other prisoners designated for immediate death. With no time to comprehend or even mourn their loss, the girls were stripped and shaven to the skin. They were tattooed with a number on their left arm. Mascha’s number is 34746. Through a series of small miracles, she managed to survive four horrendous years of captivity. On liberation she weighed only 30 kg. Her three elder sisters, all of whom she looked up to, did not share her same fate. Tragically, they died in Auschwitz.
Following the war, she was taken by a humanitarian organization to a children’s hospital, and was put into an orphanage in Bielsko. In March 1947 through the Jewish Joint Organization she located her father in Bolivia South America, and travelled to reunite with him.
In concluding her talk, Doris Krinsky said, “Remembering them [Survivors] is the key to preventing the same atrocities from occurring again. And so we must always remember the very real people, the families and the lives that were lost. Not just today but every day we must remember to ensure that it never happens again! Not to our children, not to theirs, not to anyone…ever again.”
Our dear Mascha, we will always remember you. Your courage, your strength and your kindness. Baruch Dayan Ha’emet. May her memory bring comfort to her family and friends.
Wendy Kahn
National Director
