The Heschel School

Paula Hammer (1918-2012) was born in Stryj, then a large city in Poland, now part of Ukraine. She was the youngest of Chaim and Tovah (Hollander) Hammer's five children. Her siblings were named David, Malka, Naftali and Leah. Paula was forced to leave Stryj in 1941 at the young age of 23. She was a member of the Communist Party, which made her a target of the invading German forces, possibly more so than her being Jewish. She wandered alone through Central Asia for a stressful five years. This escape saved her life; she was the only member of her nuclear family to survive. At one point, soldiers boarded a train she was on, so she threw all of her personal belongings (including photographs of her family) out a window lest they betray her Judaism. After her arrival in the United States, she learned that her sister Leah and their father Chaim perished after they were discovered hiding in an attic.

Berish Gurtman (1905-1983) was from Chorostków, a shtetl in then Poland, now Ukraine. He was one of four children born to Aharon and Miriam (Unger) Gurtman. His siblings were Raizel, Ephraim and Moshe. As a young man, he married a woman named Klara. They moved to Lvov and had a son. Berish's wife and their child both perished during the Holocaust and he never spoke of them. Berish served in the Russian Army during the war. His younger brother Moshe, who was also in the Russian army, was the only other family member to survive. After the war, Moshe was reunited with his wife, Rivka, who was hidden in a root cellar along with her sister Surke and their mother Klara. 

Paula and Berish met at the Hofgeismar DP Camp in Germany in 1946, where they were part of a group called "Kibbutz Hatikvah" before moving to a DP camp in Bad Gastein, Austria around 1946. They emigrated to the United States in 1947, aided (and likely sponsored) by relatives of Moshe's wife Rivka, who had emigrated before the war. They settled in Brooklyn where they both worked in various clothing factories. In 1959/60, they bought a grocery store in the East New York section of Brooklyn and worked there until the early 1970s. Berish retired and Paula worked in a knitting store, helping customers with needlework and knitting projects. She also got her GED and took classes at Kingsborough Community College.

Marilyn Gurtman-Oppenheimer is the only child of Berish and Paula. Their only grandchild, Leah Oppenheimer (Heschel MS 2004), is named after Paula's favorite sister.

The Gurtman Photograph Collection - the US Holocaust Memorial Museum