Brooklyn, NY – Well Known Author, Artist And WWII Heroine Lola Lieber Dies At 91

Brooklyn, NY – A Borough Park woman who was instrumental in saving the life of the Bobover Rebbe during World War II is being remembered by her family for her courageous wartime efforts as well as her prodigious efforts as an artist.

Lola Lieber, author of the Holocaust memoir A World After This, died on Motzei Shabbos and was buried on Sunday in the Bobover section of Washington Cemetery in Deans, New Jersey.

Mrs. Lieber was born to her parents Luzer and Shaindel Leser in Czecheslovakia on March 15, 1923. Born on Taanis Esther, her given name was Esther Leah, but she was known fondly as Leiku. One of five children, Mrs. Lieber spent several years of her childhood living with her maternal grandparents in Munkach, moving back to her parents and siblings in Krakow in 1937 after newly enacted laws forced her to leave Munkach.

Mrs. Lieber met her future husband Mechel at the wedding of a mutual cousin when she was just 15 years old.

“They took a liking to each other and the two families knew that they would get married, but the war broke out,” said Heshy Lieber, the oldest of Mrs. Lieber’s three children. “She was too young at the time to consider marriage so they waited.”

Both the Lieber and the Leser families were faced with the choice of staying in the Krakow ghetto or relocating to a smaller town in the hopes of living peacefully there. The Liebers elected to leave Krakow and, at their insistence, the Leser family joined them as well.

Despite deplorable conditions, the lack of food, and the desperate struggle for survival, Mechel and Lola Lieber got married in 1941.

In her book, Mrs. Lieber describes the wedding, an occasion that should have been filled with joy but was fraught with fear and despondency.

“I wept that night after the wedding,” wrote Mrs. Lieber. “I said that I had been married without a minyan, outside of a shul, had not worn a real wedding dress, and that our wedding feast was nasty and sour, and that his own mother would not loan me a tablecloth. When I had calmed down, Mechel put things into the perspective that was required for me to start down the road leading to me becoming the woman I would eventually become.”

Mechel Lieber assured his wife that better times were on their way.

“We will survive this era. It is temporary. There will be a world after this. And, if we don’t survive, Hashem forbid it, but if we do not, at least, Lola, at least we have been married.”

As circumstance worsened, the Lieber and Leser families moved to the Polish town of Bochnia.

“There made an aktzia, rounded up people, and everyone tried to hide,” said Heshy Lieber. “They pulled out my grandmother and two kids and they shot them. My parents, who were hiding in a different bunker came out later and they found them.”

Mechel Lieber and his wife snuck out in the middle of the night to bury the dead, carting them away on a pushcart. Despite the bitter cold and the snow, the young couple laid their murdered family to rest, digging their gravse in the frozen ground using a single shovel and a spoon.

In a video interview, Mrs. Lieber recalled how she had given her young sister in law Marilka a tiny doll.

“She still had it in the hand,” said Mrs. Lieber, who captured the emotional moment in a 1950 painting. “She was killed. She still held onto the doll. I don’t know, when I think, how did we do it? How did we survive it?”

A short time later a recount of Jews was held in Bochnia and Mrs. Lieber was asked where she was born. Replying that she was born in Munkach, she was excused and asked by the Gestapo commander to return the next day.

“She was a pretty young girl and everyone was scared what would happen,” said Heshy Lieber.

In her memoirs, Mrs. Lieber recalled being questioned by a commander named Schomburg, who spoke to her in Czechoslovakian, Hungarian and German to verify her claims of being from Munkach. With her excellent command of languages and her years spent in Munkach, Mrs. Lieber was able to pass herself off as a non-Polish citizen.

“He asked if I liked goulash and certain Hungarian pastries,” wrote Mrs. Lieber. “I knew all of these things, of course, and we chatted about them.”

After being questioned whether she knew a particular Hungarian song and answering in the affirmative, the commander ripped the yellow star from Mrs. Lieber’s clothing and told her she was free to leave the ghetto. Not content to walk away with her own freedom, Mrs. Lieber explained that she had other family members who were also from Munkach.

“She was told they were also free,” said Heshy Lieber.

That night the Liebers, who were close with the Bobover Rebbe, worked together with one of his chasidim who knew how to carve letters into rubber balls to create rubber stamps. Laboring through the night, they created 13 forged birth certificates, identifying a group of people,including the Bobover Rebbe and his family, as having been born in Munkach.

“The next day they went back and presented the birth certificates,” said Heshy Lieber.

The entire group was given permission to leave Poland, making their way into Czechoslovakia, with Hungary their final destination.

“The border crossings were difficult,” said Heshy Lieber. “They went in coal trucks with false bottoms. The last ones to go were my mother’s parents but they were discovered and killed.”

The Liebers kept their Jewish identities hidden at first in Hungary, but after seeing that people were still able to go to shul, Mechel Lieber became more open about his Jewish roots.

“My father was picked up and arrested Pesach night and put in the Debreczin jail,” said Heshy Lieber. “The jail was liquidated, bombed by the Russians. The walls fell and all the prisoners were taken to Budapest.”

Mrs. Lieber followed her husband to Budapest, where she met both Rudolph Kastner and the notorious Adolf Eichman.

“My mother found out where Eichman was staying and while usually there would be guards, she was able to walk right in,” said Heshy Lieber. “She was dressed up, very striking and she told a soldier there that she had an appointment. She was able to go right in.”

Expecting to see an imposing figure, Mrs. Lieber was shocked by Eichman’s appearance.

“He looked like an accountant in glasses,” said Heshy Lieber. “She couldn’t believe that this was the monster she had heard about.”

Mrs. Lieber told Eichman that her husband had been mistakenly jailed and was not Jewish. Eichman told one of the guards to bring the prisoner in question and ascertain whether or not he was actually Jewish. Realizing that her husband could be easily identified as Jewish, Mrs. Lieber slipped away before her lie could be discovered. Mechel Lieber eventually managed to bribe his way into the jail’s infirmary, and was later able to escape to freedom.

As the war entered its final days, the Bobover Rebbe asked the Liebers to join him for Pesach in Bucharest.

“It was 1945,” said Heshy Lieber. “My parents were very close with the Rebbe and he had no rebbetzin, no one. He asked my parents to please come make Pesach for him.”

In her book, Mrs. Lieber describes the Pesach Seder that year as the “most unforgettable Seder of my life.”

The Liebers remained in Bucharest for a year after the war with their eldest son Heshy one of the first babies born after World War II. During that time, Mrs. Lieber was reunited with her brother Binyomin.

“She was in the hospital and a boy came to visit a girl in the next bed,” said Heshy Lieber. “She could only see his back, but something about him looked familiar.”

Asking the girl who the visitor was, Mrs. Lieber was told it was a boy she had met at Shomer Hatzair. While the girl refused to say when she and the boy were planning on leaving to Israel, she did reveal his name: Ben.

“Someone contacted him and he came to see my mother,” said Heshy Lieber. “He was supposed to leave to Israel the next day but he decided to stay.”

Mrs. Lieber, her husband and her brother all emigrated to America, arriving in 1947 on the SS Ernie Pyle. The Liebers settled in Borough Park where they raised their family, which included two more children: a son Yossi and a daughter Mati. Mechel Lieber died of cancer in 1966.

Over the years, Mrs. Lieber began to indulge her passion for art, painting countless pictures, some of which are on display in Yad Vashem.

“Even as a child she had tremendous talent,” said Heshy Lieber. “She won a competition when she was still living in Munkach and she won a scholarship to a school in Holland, but her parents never told her. When the war came, that curtailed everything but she started painting again when she came here.”

Mrs. Lieber owned an art gallery in Borough Park and her paintings can be found in galleries across the United States, with a permanent collection in both the San Francisco Museum of Art and Yad Vashem as well as in private collections.

“She did literally hundreds of portraits,” said Heshy Lieber. “She did many styles. Rebbeshe portraits, modern art, traditional, impressionist.”

Over the years the Liebers maintained close ties with Bobov, with both Heshy and Yossi Lieber attending Bobover yeshivos.

“My mother was close with the whole family,” observed Heshy Lieber. “When I used to take her to the cemetery to visit my father she would want to go visit the Bobover Rebbe’s sisters also.”

Mrs. Lieber counted her twelve grandchildren, 50 great grandchildren and four great-great grandchildren as her ultimate victory over the Nazis. Her health had begun to deteriorate in recent years, and she passed away on her husband’s 48th yahrtzeit.

“Sometimes you hear about husbands and wives who die on the same day, but usually they are korbanos of a war,” said Heshy Lieber, who noted that his parents had an exceptionally strong marriage. “For a husband and wife to die on the same day? That is very, very rare.”

Online:
http://lola-lieber.com/index.html