HELENA — A 100-year-old Holocaust survivor was honored Thursday afternoon at the AARP Montana State Office.
Through the AARP's Wish of a Lifetime Program, she had a reunion with her sister this summer. Helena Stefanaik shared her story that embodies the importance of never forgetting.
Stefanaik of Helena, originally from Warsaw, Poland, lives to tell the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust that she experienced in Poland's capital almost 80 years later. The Holocaust was a systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of other people in Nazi-occupied countries during World War II. There are an estimated 38,400 survivors of the Holocaust alive in the United States today, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum.
Stefaniak was born in 1924, lost her mother at four, and went to stay with her father. In her teens, her father brought her to a house of nuns in the city where she stayed when the war broke out in 1939. According to the Institute for the Study of Rescue and Altruism in the Holocaust (ISRAH), Franciscan Nuns had "more than 100 houses in the city at the time."
Stefanaik details living in Warsaw during the late 1930s and early 1940s: "Everybody was hungry, especially because we didn't have fields to grow vegetables. So I don't know how we survived. I don't even know."
After surviving the three-month Warsaw uprising in which hundreds of thousands died. Stefanaik was abducted from the streets of Warsaw and taken to a forced labor camp in Nazi-occupied Germany. "Whoever was alive and capable, they took us to [Nazi-occupied] Germany to work," she said.
Almost a year later, Americans liberated the camp Stefanaik was in, and she remained in Germany for five years after being freed.
At this point, she was still separated from her family, specifically her younger sister, Barbara. They reunited four years later, in 1947
Then, Helena got married, and her husband befriended an American soldier whose parents, upon being asked, agreed to sponsor the couple's immigration to the US. They later split up.
As she has aged, traveling has become more challenging for Sefanaik. However, she wanted to see her 96-year-old younger sister Barbra, who lives in Clifton, New Jersey, in person.
In August, the two reunited in Newark, New Jersey. Helena was filled with joy over having the ability to see her sister. "I was very happy that I was able to see her because going on my own was almost impossible; without all the help I got from AARP, I would probably never have seen her again."
When she saw her sister again, Helena described her feelings: "I felt that I was in seventh heaven I was so happy that I could see her; at least I knew there was the last time, and she knew that it was the last time, in person." The sisters speak via phone almost every day.
Both sisters stress the importance of remembering the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews, including Polish prisoners of war and others deemed enemies of the Nazi regime.
Helena hopes for peace in the future, drawing on her life experiences. "Now it's about 75 years since the end of the war, but it would be nice if there were no wars at all," emphasized Stefaniak.
She closed by saying she adores her home state.
"I love Montana; it's the best state, probably."
