Tania Lefman

Tania Lefman was born on August 15, 1929, in Korets, Poland, near the Russian border. Following the German occupation in 1941, Tania and her mother were forced from their home into the Korets ghetto. As conditions worsened and Jews were taken from the ghetto and killed, they escaped. Tania initially hid with a Polish farming family who had worked for her mother, but when her presence became known to neighbors, she joined her mother and several other Jews hiding underground in the surrounding forest. They remained in hiding for roughly two years, before eventually joining partisans toward the end of the war. After the war, Tania and her mother eventually made their way to the Landsberg displaced persons camp in Germany from 1945 to 1950. In Landsberg, she met her future husbanad, Henry Lefman, a fellow Polish Jewish survivor who had survived several concentration camps and was studying engineering. In March 1950, at age twenty, Tania immigrated alone to the United States, traveling aboard the General J. H. McRae and entering through Ellis Island before joining relatives in Boston. Tania worked in a garment factory while attending high school at night, and she and Henry married in 1951 after he immigrated to the United States. They raised three children. In later life, Lefman became active in the Greater Boston Jewish and Holocaust survivor communities. She volunteered with organizations that assist other survivors, participated in synagogue life, and served as treasurer for a Holocaust survivors’ organization.