Barbara Stimler was born in 1927 in Aleksandrów Kujawski, near Poland’s border with Germany. Her childhood was happy: she was an only child and her parents showered her with love and affection.  She had many school friends and encountered little antisemitism.

Following the invasion of Poland in 1939 Barbara and her parents had to leave their home and seek shelter with her uncle in Lubraniec in central Poland, which seemed safer at the time.  However, they were soon forced to move on to Kutno in January 1940, where they were arrested and placed in a disused tobacco factory with many other prisoners.  While here, Barbara had to watch as her father was cruelly ill-treated by the SS – to the point where he almost died.  People interned in the factory were also forced to witness the execution of randomly selected men.  One night Barbara and thousands of other Jews were transferred to a large dilapidated sugar factory.  Conditions here were dreadful – the place was terribly overcrowded and the prisoners were desperate with hunger and disease.

Through connections with the Jewish Council, Barbara’s uncle arranged for the family to be moved back to Lubraniec in July 1940. However, at the end of 1941 all Jewish men, including Barbara’s father, were deported for forced labour in Fort Radziwil.  Barbara never saw him again.

Three months later all the Jewish women in Lubraniec were deported to the Łódź ghetto where Barbara got a job in a children’s hospital.  Whilst there Barbara’s mother became paralysed and unable to fend for herself, and Barbara had to make her meagre rations suffice for the two of them.  Every morning Barbara had to drag her mother to a hiding place in a ditch, hoping that her mother would still be there on her return from work.

Barbara’s job ended abruptly when an SS unit appeared in the hospital with gas cylinders and gassed all the orphans. Barbara would be haunted by her memories of this episode for the rest of her life. She had to start looking for another job, but one Sunday morning in the summer of 1943 she was suddenly arrested and deported.  Before being put on a train Barbara had to say goodbye to her paralysed mother.   Their parting words were, ‘God should be with us’.  Barbara’s train took her to Auschwitz.

From Auschwitz she was dispatched to a farm in Parazkow on the pre-war polish border to dig anti-tank defences.  Then in December 1944 she was forced to march towards Germany with only snow for food and wooden clogs for shoes.  Those unable to walk were shot on the spot.  During one overnight stop on a farm, Barbara and a friend hid themselves in a very large haystack and were able to separate themselves from the march.  They lived on snow and raw potatoes for 11 days.  A farmer betrayed them and they were re-arrested, but a sudden air raid by the Allied Air Force gave them a second chance to escape.  They arrived in a place called Lieben and had to declare themselves Christians in order to find food and work until the Russian army arrived.  Upon liberation Barbara and her friend began the journey back to Poland.  A newspaper journalist in Poland helped her to trace her family in England, and she came to London, where she still resides.