[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 64 (Tuesday, April 26, 2016)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E594]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]





               HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY, TEMA POSALSKA BAUER

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, April 26, 2016

  Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor my constituent, 
Tema Posalska Bauer, on the occasion of her upcoming 100th birthday. 
Her birthday is especially notable in light of her miraculous survival 
through the horrors she endured during World War II.
  At the time that the Nazis invaded Poland in September of 1939, Tema 
was a young woman of 23 living with her elderly parents and her next 
oldest sister, Sarah, in the City of Lodz, a city that was home at the 
time to the second largest Jewish population in Poland. At the time, 
she had seven other older brothers and sisters who were married with 
children and living in smaller towns near Lodz.
  With the occupation by the Nazis, the siblings feared for the safety 
of their elderly parents and decided that it would be safer for the 
parents to move to the smaller town where one sister, Gucia, was living 
with her husband and three sons. Sarah accompanied them on the trip, 
and Tema was to close the house and follow after the winter.
  However, before the winter ended, the Nazis created a Jewish ghetto 
in Lodz in which all Jews had to reside and from which no Jews could 
leave. Tema never saw her parents or her sister Sarah again.
  She worked in the Ghetto for four years until she was deported in 
December of 1943 to a slave labor camp at Skarzysko-Kamienna. Normally 
a two-hour train ride from Lodz to Skarzysko-Kamienna, the trip 
actually took three full days. The women were packed into the freight 
train cars so tightly that there was no room to sit, no water, no food 
and no bathroom facilities.
  With the Russians approaching from the west, Skarzysko-Kamienna was 
liquidated in August of 1944 and the women were sent by freight trains 
to a slave labor camp in Leipzig, Germany. During an Allied bombing of 
the camp in February of 1945, Tema was injured--her right arm being 
severed at the elbow. Though antibiotics were unavailable, she had 
great luck and strength and survived. Two months later, the camp was 
liquidated, and she began what turned out to be a six-day death march, 
that she again miraculously survived.
  After liberation, she made her way back to Lodz where she found out 
that of her parents, eight brothers and sisters, their seven spouses 
and her eighteen nieces and nephews, all had been murdered by the 
Nazis, most of them gassed to death in the extermination camp at 
Chelmno--their bodies reduced to ash and bones in the crematoria.
  She eventually encountered a man she had known in the Ghetto, Morris 
Bauer. He told her that she need not be worried about the future 
because he would always take care of her. And, for the rest of his 
life, he did until he was no longer able to take care of himself.
  They married and then spent almost four years in a displaced persons 
camp waiting to emigrate to the United States. They arrived in the 
United States on October 1, 1949 and settled in Chicago.
  Tema's beloved husband, Morris, passed away in 1995 shortly before 
their 50th wedding anniversary from complications from Alzheimer's. She 
has lived to enjoy her expanding family of two sons, three 
grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. She remains mentally sharp 
with an amazing memory and with a keen interest in current events and 
politics.
  Tema's 100th birthday is May 5th--the same day the world will observe 
Holocaust Remembrance Day. As Tema gathers with her family that day to 
remember and mourn the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, 
including her and Morris' parents, siblings, nieces and nephews, her 
family also will celebrate the miraculous life and remarkable courage 
and luck of their family's matriarch, Tema Posalska Bauer. Her life is 
a blessing and an inspiration to her family and to all who know her.

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