Gender: girl
School:
School #8B
John - I think you are absolutely correct in your hypothesis that Masza was in Bad Woerishofen with her mother, and there's good evidence to back it up. Beyond the convergence of the Yad Vashem testimony and Sh'arit ha-pl'atah record you found, there are records for both Masza and her mother from Dachau, as well as Natzweiler-Struthof. As is often the case, their birth dates are slightly off, but it is clearly them (in fact, Masza is listed as being born in Litzmannstadt and Sara in Jendrzejow, the same town as the one listed in the Yad Vashem testimony). In fact, we can deduce that they stayed together throughout the Holocaust. They even have consecutive prisoner registration numbers, and both wind up at Bad Woerishofen.
According to secondary sources, Masza and Sara were likely among approximately 150 Jewish women transported from Lodz via Auschwitz (where, according to the testimony, Majlech died or was killed) and through Bergen-Belsen in late 1944 to Geislingen, a subcamp of Natzweiler-Struthof, where they worked in the Wuettembergische Metallwaren factory.
In March 1945, the Germans disbanded these sub-camps. SS guards accompanied most of the prisoners on brutal forced marches toward the Dachau Concentration Camp in southern Germany. The Geisenheim prisoners marched to the Dachau sub-camp of Allach; many died or were shot by the SS guards on the way. According to the Dachau records, Masza and Sara wound up at Allach, too. From there, they would have gone to Bad Woerishofen after liberation, where it appears that Sara died.
Note postwar records indicate that a "Maeza Przysuska" emigrated to Australia after the war. In addition, the Yad Vashem testimony you found was submitted by Sara's sister (Masza's aunt), Hadassa Teicher, and that she listed Melbourne, Australia as her residence. Hadassa's daughter, Janina, also gave testimony to the USC Shoah Visual History Foundation project. In that, she mentions that Masza Prysuska was her cousin, confirms that they were together in Bad Woerishofen, and shows a photograph of her. Masza did indeed survive the Holocaust. She died in late 1993.
Would you like to enter this information into the data fields or shall I?