How Did a Young Woman Become Her Family’s Sole Survivor of the Holocaust?
By: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Tags: Holocaust, Film, Ukraine, World War II, Soviet Union

More than 1.5 million Jews were killed in mass shootings or gas vans in that part of Europe. This story of the “Holocaust by bullets” has been the subject of heightened academic study since the fall of the Soviet Union, but has less representation in popular culture. My Name is Sara, through the story of one brave young woman, vividly portrays this context in which so many victims were killed and just a few, like Sara, managed to survive.

Sara (Guralnik) Shapiro with her son, Mickey Shapiro, at a displaced persons camp in 1948 after she survived the Holocaust. —Courtesy of Mickey Shapiro

It is inspired by a true story. Sara Guralnik grew up with her parents and three brothers in Koretz, now Ukraine. In her oral history, Sara describes a pleasant childhood during which she attended public school, had both Jewish and non-Jewish friends, and spoke Yiddish at home. She remembers eating Sabbath meals on Friday night with her family.

That life changed drastically when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, when she was 11 years old. When Sara went to school afterward, her teacher said, “‘You are Jew, and you cannot come to school any more.’ And he gave me a slap in the face, and I went home and cried.”

Sara’s parents paid an acquaintance to hide their two older children, Sara and her older brother, Moishe, if it became necessary. When they heard that the ghetto in Koretz was going to be burned down, they sent Sara and Moishe to the acquaintance in the night. The next day, the two children heard that all the Jews in Koretz, including their parents and two younger brothers, had been killed. Their would-be rescuer was reluctant to hide the two Jewish youths so Sara decided to strike out on her own to increase her chances of survival. Moishe later was apprehended by the police and killed.

Deep in the Ukrainian countryside, Sara asked for work and hid her Jewish religion, assuming the identity of her childhood friend Manya Romanchuk. A family took her in to help with farm work and care for their young children, offering only room and board and remaining suspicious of her origins. Sara hid in plain sight, enduring grueling labor and pretending to be Christian, until Soviet forces liberated the area in late 1943.

The film about Sara’s life explores the choices and motivations of the many people like those she might have encountered during the war — the couple who take her in but also mistreat her, local resistance members fighting the Nazi occupation, and the Nazi occupiers and their Ukrainian collaborators.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will host a live conversation about My Name Is Sara on March 18, 2021, honoring Sara Guralnik’s life and legacy during Women’s History Month. Register to attend the event, which will feature the film’s director and producer, Steven Oritt; the young Polish actress who plays Sara, Zuzanna Surowy; and two of Sara’s descendants — her son and the film’s executive producer Mickey Shapiro and her granddaughter Lisa Gold. Dr. Elizabeth Anthony, a Museum historian, will give context on the experience of women during the Holocaust, which reflect many of the challenges women face during war to this day. Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday will moderate the discussion.

The Museum’s collection includes oral testimony from Sara and her husband, Asa Shapiro, who also was a Holocaust survivor from Koretz. Learn more about the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union in the Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Color images: Film stills from My Name Is Sara featuring Zuzanna Surowy, the actress who portrays Sara. Courtesy of Robert Palka