PEABODY — Holocaust survivor Sonia Schreiber Weitz carried with her a horrific story when she moved to Peabody in the late 1940s.
Just three years earlier, at 16 years old, Weitz had been liberated from the Mauthausen death camp in Austria after surviving four others, including Auschwitz.
She weighed 60 pounds and was weak with typhus when American troops found her. Except for her sister, Blanca, and brother-in-law Norbert, all 84 members of her family had been murdered by the Nazis — all for the sole reason of being Jewish.
It’s a story of hate Weitz herself called indescribable. Yet, she dedicated her life to finding the words to tell it through her poetry and many discussions with young students.
With Jan. 27 marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, her friends and family insisted that it must not be a story lost to time.
“If we forget the Holocaust, we will dishonor the memory of the victims who number in the millions, including more than 6 million Jewish souls,” Lappin Foundation Executive Director Debbie Coltin said at a Zoom event honoring Weitz’s memory Monday evening.
“Today, we remember and we don’t forget.”
Weitz died from cancer at age 81 in 2010. She spoke to thousands of schoolchildren and college students during her life and was a member of the council advising the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.
In 1982, she created the Holocaust Center Boston North in Peabody with her friend Harriet Wacks. The center merged with Salem State University following her death and is now known as the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Weitz’s story started in Krakow, Poland. Her happy childhood morphed into one strained by the persecution of Jewish people once the Nazis invaded the country in 1939.
It was in the Krakow Ghetto, where Jews were forced to live in overcrowded apartments with little food, that Weitz began seeing her family disappear and, eventually, learned of their murder.
Weitz described the time and the rest of her experiences during the Holocaust in the recording of a speech she made before her death that was played during Monday’s event.
“The very first victim in my family was an uncle of mine who was arrested together with the leadership of his city, my uncle Henrik, and he was taken to Auschwitz before it became a real death factory,” she said.
“He was killed, and his ashes were sent to my aunt. This is the first time I saw my father cry, and of course, would not be the last.”
Weitz survived for a time using false papers that said she was 14, older than her real age, as the Nazis were rounding up all children under 14 at the time, and also papers that claimed she was Aryan, not Jewish, so she could sneak out of the ghetto. Her mother also dyed her hair blonde to make the lie more convincing.
The changes protected her for only so long.
Her mother was soon put on a transport of Jews heading to concentration camps, never to be seen again.
With the Nazis banning Jews from having pencils and paper, Weitz turned to writing poetry in her head to document what was happening and, in her own way, try to make sense of the devastation.
One of her most poignant poems details one of her last memories of her father.
Weitz, her father and her sister were taken to their first camp together. Separated by sections for men and women, Weitz snuck into her father’s bunkhouse and shared a dance with him to the song of another prisoner’s hidden harmonica.
“I danced with you that one time only.
“How sad you were, how tired, lonely …
“You knew that they would ‘take’ you soon …
“So when your bunk-mate played a tune
“You whispered: ‘Little one, let us dance,
“We may not have another chance.’”
Weitz’s poem was true. Her father was taken away shortly after and was killed just two weeks before the end of World War II.
She and her sister would be moved between death camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe and endured the Nazi’s most heinous treatment.
They shivered with fever in bunkhouses with little food and no heat, worked as slave laborers in Nazi war factories, struggled to breathe in stifling cattle cars and stepped over bodies during excruciatingly long death marches.
She called the Black American soldier who found her upon the liberation of Mauthausen a “Black Messiah.”
“The horror on his face is something that even in my state, I cannot ever forget,” she said.
It took four decades for Weitz to open up about her survival of the Holocaust. During Monday’s event, Mayor Ted Bettencourt and District Attorney Paul Tucker recalled attending Weitz’s speeches over the years. For Bettencourt, it was as a student at Peabody Veterans Memorial High School.
“I always remember her speaking about being an upstander, being somebody who sticks up for people and is there for people in difficult moments and won’t stand by and allow something terrible to happen,” he said.
“To be somebody that is on the good side, helping one another, really, that’s what life is all about.”
Contact Caroline Enos at CEnos@northofboston.com.