page_title: Zofia Olszakowska-Glazer
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Zofia Olszakowska-Glazer / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Cypora Zonszajn (12 April 1915 – 1942) with Rachela (Rachel) Zonszajn orphaned in 1942 during the Holocaust in occupied Poland. Family photograph taken before the murderous liquidation of the Siedlce Ghetto in 1942. Polski: Cypora Zonszajn i osierocona Rachela (Rachel) Zonszajn przed Holocaustem. Zbiory ŻIH na stronie Sprawiedliwi.org.
context_page_description: Zofia Glazer née Olszakowska and Cypora Zonszajn née Jabłoń were two close friends from the prewar Gymnasium of Queen Jadwiga in the city of Siedlce, in the Second Polish Republic. Cypora was a Polish Jew born into an affluent family. Zofia was the daughter of a local Catholic pharmacist in Siedlce. They studied together for their final matura exam, after which the two girls went their separate ways until the Holocaust in occupied Poland.
  During the September 1939 Nazi–Soviet invasion of Poland both women were in Siedlce, separated by circumstances beyond their control. At the end of November, the new German administration ordered the creation of a Judenrat. On Christmas Eve the Nazis set fire to the synagogue and burned it to the ground, with Jewish refugees inside. Cypora and her family were forced into the newly formed Nazi ghetto in Siedlce around August 1941. Over a year later, she wrote a first-person account of its murderous liquidation. Cypora committed suicide in November 1942 when her husband Jakub was put on a death train to Treblinka extermination camp.
context_section_description: After her high school graduation Zofia enrolled at the Warsaw School of Economics, where she studied the cooperative movement. She was one of the protesting students against the Numerus clausus form of segregation introduced by the Sanacja government. She continued her studies in Sweden until the invasion of Poland, and came back to Siedlce as soon as the war began. She made contacts with the Polish underground resistance movement and became associated with the Bataliony Chłopskie partisans.
  Also from Siedlce, Cypora was one of five Jewish teenagers in Zofia's class. Upon graduation, Cypora enrolled at the Institute of Agriculture in Warsaw. Back in Siedlce, she married Jakub Zonszajn, a typesetter. Following the 1939 invasion of Poland, Cypora and her family were forced to move into the Siedlce Ghetto created by the occupational authority formally on 2 August 1941 and closed off from the outside on 1 October 1941. On that day, Cypora gave birth to her baby girl Rachela (Rachel). In order to provide for the family, her husband Jakub joined the Jewish Ghetto Police organized by the Judenrat Council on the orders of the Nazi administration in the ghetto. His decision helped them survive the ghetto liquidation action, but only for several months.
caption: Cypora Jabłoń Zonszajn with her baby daughter Rachela (Rachel) Zonszajn, in the Siedlce Ghetto, 1942
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