Berta Klipstein
Berta was born in Bielsko, Poland in March 1927. Berta’s war-story is one of endurance, spending over a year in a Siberian gulag and travelling through Russia, Siberia, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, on disease-infested boats, trains which needed to be pushed by the passengers, and a pump-trolley. From 1941 Berta and her family lived in Uzbekistan under extremely difficult conditions. Berta was in Moscow the day the war ended and then returned to Bielsko where she met her future husband Zyga. Berta came to England in 1946 with Rabbi Schonfeld and moved to Israel in 2018, aged 91. (Forced Emigration to Soviet Union,)
When the train became the target of the bombs we knew we had to leave it. We ran into a field; we lay flat on the ground with our faces in the grass, with our hands outstretched and our mouths open so that our ear membranes did not burst.
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