Photo from the collection of: Florida Holocaust Museum

 

Mary Wygodski

Born: August 11, 1925, Vilna, Poland

Mary Wygodski was born in Vilna, Poland and was raised as the eldest of three sisters and one brother in a traditional middle class Jewish family. Her father was in the leather business.

After the Nazi occupation, her family was sent to the Vilna Ghetto. In 1943, she was separated from her mother and two sisters at a boxcar and never saw them again. Mary was transported to the Kaiserwald Labor Camp in Riga, Latvia and then to the Stutthof Camp in Germany. From there she was transferred to Magdeburg Labor Camp where she made artillery shells in the Polte factory. After the war, she learned that her father and brother had been executed in a concentration camp in Klooga, Estonia.

Mary has two children and two grandchildren.