Hasia Aufschauer, nee Chaya Sara Honikman, was born in Lodz, Poland on January 7, 1923. She had 5 siblings and lived in a new area of Lodz called Chojny, which had about 200,250 Jews before the war. Her father was a kosher butcher. Her home served as the orthodox synagogue for the local butchers and was called, The Katsuvish Synagogue. Hasia went to a public, predominately Catholic school, and most of her friends were Catholic. Hasia belonged to Betar, a Zionist youth group.

After the German invasion, her family fled to Czestochowa to her father’s relatives and she went to a small village, Myszkow, and became the family provider, working as a black market smuggler near the German border. She bought chickens from Polish farmers, sold them to Jews and sent food to her family in Czestochowa through the Polish Red Cross. In 1941 the Germans took one brother to Markstadt, a labor camp of Gross-Rosen run by Krupp. Hasia was caught and deported from Sosnowice to a women’s slave labor camp in, Parshnitz, near Prague, in Sudetengau, a German southern province of Czechoslovakia. The women worked in a flax factory, Hasse, making linen. Hasia was helped by a Czech-German foreman who was later honored by Yad Vashem. Hasia describes in detail the horrors and worsening conditions after the SS took over in 1942, as well as the sufferings and brutality in the mass evacuation from the camp in the final stages of the war. They survived because they remained at the factory and were liberated by the Russians on May 8, 1945. One of Hasia’s brothers survived, but her parents and younger siblings perished in Auschwitz, and an older brother was killed by Polish partisans. She describes her painful return to her parents’ home in Chojny after the war. Hasia stayed in Raichanbach1, Germany where she met her future husband. She describes how they lived in Weiden, Germany after the war. A daughter was born in 1946 in Germany. In 1949 they came to the United States where a son was born in 1953.