Irene Weiss

Prepared by the Witnesses of War team

Irene Weiss was born Perl Ruchel Fogel on 21 November 1930 in Bótrágy, Czechoslovakia, now Batrad, Ukraine. She was one of six children of Meyer and Leah Fogel. Her father owned a lumberyard. After the region came under Hungarian rule in 1938, antisemitic restrictions disrupted the family’s life, and Meyer was conscripted into forced labor in 1942.

In April 1944, following Germany’s occupation of Hungary, the family was confined in the Munkács brick-factory ghetto. They were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May, when Irene was thirteen. During the selection, an SS officer separated her from her eleven-year-old sister, Edith. Irene and her older sister, Serena, were selected for forced labor; their mother and three younger siblings were murdered in the gas chambers. Their father and older brother also perished during the Holocaust.

An SS photographer captured Irene on the arrival ramp, wearing a headscarf and searching for Edith. Decades later, her daughter brought home a reproduction of the Auschwitz Album, and Irene recognized herself in the photograph. Another image showed her mother and younger brothers, Reuven and Gershon, waiting before their murder. The photographs preserved the very moments when her family was torn apart.

Irene and Serena spent eight months sorting stolen belongings in Birkenau’s “Kanada” warehouses. In January 1945, they were forced onto a death march and subsequently imprisoned at Ravensbrück and its Neustadt-Glewe subcamp. Both survived, together with their aunt Rose, and made their way to Prague.

After living in Teplice-Šanov, Irene immigrated to the United States in 1947. She married Martin Weiss in 1949, raised three children and became a teacher in Virginia. Later, she shared her testimony through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and testified in German trials of former Auschwitz personnel, giving a voice to the child preserved in the photograph.