July 20, 1922 – Dec. 14, 2023
During World War II, Anna Post escaped death at many turns.
The first time, in December 1941, she was pulled from a train by the Gestapo, accused of impersonating a non-Jew and forced to dig her own grave. But darkness fell before she finished. She woke up the next day expecting to die, but instead she was released.
“That morning I found out the Jewish Council had made a bribe – a pair of boots for life,” she said.
During the following year, she was warned one day not to return home from a work detail in the countryside. She slipped away and learned the next day that all of the Jews in the city had been killed or deported.
Escaping to Krakow, she was caught without ID and sent to Auschwitz. Blond and blue-eyed, she did not look Jewish, so she was consigned to forced labor instead of the gas chambers.
When she watched NBC-TV’s five-part “Holocaust” series in 1978, she was so chilled by the memories that she jumped up and got a blanket.
Mrs. Post went on to become one of the Buffalo area’s earliest and foremost speakers about the genocide, talking about her harrowing experiences for 40 years in schools, places of worship and community forums. Her 3½-hour testimony on film is preserved at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
She died Dec. 14 in Jacksonville, Fla., where she had lived for the past four years. She was 101.
The youngest of six children, she was born Anna Dula in the village of Bronocice, Poland, about 35 miles northeast of Krakow, where her father ran a flour mill. The family moved in 1929 to the nearby city of Dzialosyce, which had a strong Jewish community and better schools.
Her family disappeared after the Nazis deported all the Jews from the city in 1942. Shortly after that, she met up with two of her brothers, who briefly helped her hide, but she never saw her parents again.
She nearly died from typhoid fever in Auschwitz, ate tree bark to survive on a death…
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