San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Sonia Orbuch — fought Nazis as child
“She always said you have to stand up early against wrongs, against injustice, against anti-Semitism.”
Sonia Orbuch, who survived the Holocaust in eastern Europe by joining a partisan band to fight the Germans, died last Sunday at home in Corte Madera. She was 93.
In her later years, Orbuch was an author and gave public talks about her life during the war. “She deeply touched young people in particular, teens who were the same age as Sonia when she fled to the forest and fought back,” Fred Rosenbaum, a longtime friend, said in a eulogy delivered at her funeral Wednesday.
“She always said you have to stand up early against wrongs, against injustice, against antiSemitism,” her son, Paul Orbuch, said. “That was her line, her message.” She was born Sarah Shainwald in the eastern Polish town of Luboml and was only 16 when German forces occupied her hometown and began killing Jews. She and her family fled to the nearby forests and spent a desperately cold winter in hiding.
By spring, they joined a band of partisans, made up of Soviet soldiers and civilians, who were running guerrilla operations against the
Paul Orbuch, Sonia Orbucch’s son
Germans, blowing up trains, ambushing convoys and sniping at outposts. They were reluctant to take in a Jewish refugee family without military skills, but were persuaded by Sonia’s uncle Tzvi, who had been a scout in the Polish army and knew the area.
The partisans thought Sarah’s name sounded too Jewish, so she was renamed Sonia. She was Sonia for the rest of her life. “Her nom de guerre,” Paul Orbuch said.
Though she had no medical training, Sonia learned to tend to the wounded. She stood sentry duty and went out on guerrilla raids. She always carried two grenades: one for the Germans and one for herself. She did not want to be taken alive. “Suddenly, I was not afraid of bombs — me, a girl who had been afraid of a fly,” she said later.
When her uncle was killed, the partisan commander had a harsh message for the remainder of the family. “Here, you are not allowed to cry,” he said.
As the Germans pulled back on the Eastern Front, Sonia and her family made their way back to their old hometown. There had been 8,000 residents, most of them Jews before the war, but only 50 were left. “It was like a ghost town,” she said.
Not long after the war ended, Sonia met and married Isaak Orbuch, a former Polish cavalry officer. Eastern Poland had been absorbed into the Soviet Union, but the couple made their way to the American-occupied zone of Germany. They remained in a displaced person camp for four years, and emigrated to the United States in 1949.
Isaak Orbuch started a real estate business in New York, but was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1960.
The family later moved to California, and Sonia devoted her life to managing her husband’s fight against the debilitating disease. “Tragically, this was one war that even Sonia could not win,” Rosenbaum said. Isaak Orbuch died in 1998.
In 2009, Orbuch wrote her autobiography, “Here There Are No Sarahs,” and helped found the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, which honors the memory of the 20,000 to 30,000 Jews who fought in resistance groups in World War II.
She is survived by her son, Paul of San Anselmo; a daughter, Bella Whelan of Mill Valley; and by a granddaughter.
Services have been held. Memorial contributions may be made to the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, 2245 Post Street, Suite 204, San Francisco, CA 94115.
Carl Nolte is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cnolte@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carlnoltesf