By Ellen Braunstein
When Soviet soldiers handed a fresh fish to a group of liberated young women in 1945, Rosa Tennenbaum did what she knew how to do. She chopped it, seasoned it and made sweet gefilte fish, the way her family in Poland had prepared it for generations. The soldier took a bite, spat it out and demanded to know what she had done to his fish. Later, Rosa laughed at the memory. After years of terror, she had made something familiar — a small reminder of home, of ordinary life before the war.
Rosa Zygmund Burk, a Holocaust survivor who rebuilt a quiet, steady life in the United States and became the heart of a close Philadelphia family, died Sept. 16. She was 100.
She was born on June 1, 1925, in Szydłowiec, Poland, to David and Ethel Tennenbaum. Her father worked in a shoe factory and was active in the General Jewish Labor Bund, a secular socialist movement that sought to improve the lives of Jewish workers in Eastern Europe. The family spoke Yiddish at home and Polish at school, where Jewish subjects were taught separately. They shared a multistory house with relatives, with three branches of the family on three floors. Only Rosa and two cousins survived the war.
When German forces invaded Poland in 1939, her town changed overnight. She recalled raids on Jewish homes, men dragged into the streets and humiliated and synagogues set on fire. The Nazis set up a Judenrat, a Jewish council forced to carry out German orders under threat of violence. Jews from larger cities crowded into the area,
bringing disease and hunger with the overcrowding.
Around Rosh Hashanah at the end of 1942, Rosa, 17 years old, was deported on foot to the Skarżysko-Kamienna labor camp and assigned to the HASAG munitions factory. She worked long hours in freezing conditions with little food and no safety protections. In one section of the plant, workers who handled chemicals turned yellow from poison exposure and died within weeks, including her father.
“She was always fearful,” said her daughter, Allyn Zygmund-Felt. “When she became sick, someone took pity on her and let her keep working instead of sending her to her death. Survival often came by accident.”
In 1944, Rosa was moved to another HASAG factory in Częstochowa, where daily “selections” determined who lived and who died. As the Soviet Army approached in January 1945, the guards ordered a death march to the west. Rosa and a few other young women refused to go. They hid in a latrine until the columns moved out. A few days later, they walked into town and were taken in by Soviet soldiers, who put them to work in a field hospital caring for the wounded. It was during that period that she cooked the sweet gefilte fish for a Russian officer who could not believe what he was eating.
After the war, Rosa did not return to Szydłowiec. Violent antisemitism persisted in the region. She fled to the American occupation zone in Erfurt, Germany and then to Frankfurt am Main. At the Zeilsheim Displaced Persons camp in Frankfurt, which was supported by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, she met Chaim Zygmund, a fellow survivor liberated from Buchenwald. They married, settled briefly in Frankfurt and immigrated to the United States on Feb. 2, 1950, with the help of HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
In Pittsburgh, Chaim Zygmund worked at a Heinz factory. The couple later bought a chicken farm in Vineland, New Jersey, joining a postwar community of Jewish refugees who tried their hand at poultry farming in South Jersey. After several years, they moved to the Northeast Philadelphia area and ran small businesses, including beer distributorships and a five-and-dime store. Chaim died in 1966, leaving Rosa a widow with two children. She managed the business for a time, later opened a fabric store and, in the 1970s, married Maksymilian Burk. They lived on the West Coast for several years before she returned to the Philadelphia area around 1988 to be near her first grandchild.
Rosa kept a kosher home and observed Jewish holidays in the practical way she had learned from her parents. “My father loved the long Seder,” Zygmund-Felt said. “My mother didn’t talk about synagogue much, but she knew the traditions.” She was an expert seamstress who made her own dresses and clothes for her daughter. In the kitchen, she was known for chicken soup with matzah balls, kreplach and fresh gefilte fish made from live carp.
Public speaking about the Holocaust was not how Rosa processed her past. She recorded a formal oral history for an archive but spoke about it only in private. “She told vignettes,” ZygmundFelt said — small stories about her home before the war, the factories where she worked and the relatives she saw from afar but could not reach. The details surfaced rarely and on her own terms.
Her grandson Gabriel Zygmund-Felt remembered her presence more than her testimony. “She babysat us, cooked whatever we wanted and made sure we had family dinners every week,” he said. “When she did talk about the camps, it wasn’t often. But when someone who’s been through that trusts you enough to share, it’s meaningful.”
As she grew older, family remained the center of her world. She lived in a two-story house with her son, Harry, offering him companionship well into her 99th year.
“She was resilient,” Zygmund-Felt said. “She endured so much and still made a home for us.”
Ellen Braunstein is a freelance writer