My Name Is Sara

An award-winning film produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation

"[T]he story tracks Sara’s grueling months hiding out on the increasingly beleaguered farm. Whether it’s deflecting Pavlo’s baser intentions, keeping Pavlo and Nadya’s sexual secrets, enduring the terrors of the area’s Nazi occupiers or braving a marauding band of Russian partisans, Sara’s keen and crafty survival instincts are always on display — and stirring to behold." — Los Angeles Times

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Strand Releasing is distributing My Name Is Sara in theaters across the United States July 2022.

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An award-winning feature film based on a true story of survival, produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation.

My Name Is Sara shares the story of Sara Góralnik who at age 13 survived the Holocaust by passing as a Christian after her family was killed by Nazis.

For more information on how to view the film, visit the official My Name Is Sara website.

Live Zoom Discussion about My Name Is Sara

Moderated by Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen D. Smith with special guests Zuzanna Surowy, Lead Actress (starring as Sara); Steven Oritt, Director/Producer; David Himmelstein, Screenwriter; Mickey Shapiro, Executive Producer and USC Shoah Foundation Board of Councilors Executive Committee Member; and Andy Intrater, Executive Producer and USC Shoah Foundation Board of Councilors Executive Committee Member

Join Us By Contributing Your Family Story

Add your family photo to our USC Shoah Foundation Family Album

The award-winning film My Name Is Sara was produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation. We also encourage you to be part of our discussion and breathe life and light into the stories of the past by contributing your own family history.

Please share with us a family photograph with a one-sentence caption that gives us a window into your story.

Email them to SFFamilyalbum@gmail.com to be a part of this meaningful collection. Submissions may be included by USC Shoah Foundation in an online gallery and on social media channels.

“When I see my mother Sara surrounded by all of us, I am reminded of her incredible resilience and miraculous will to survive—eventually building a family of her own here in the United States.

My Name Is Sara is in honor of her defiant act to continue her legacy on behalf of her family who perished along with millions of others in the Holocaust.”

—Mickey Shapiro, Second Generation Survivor – Executive Producer My Name Is Sara

Sara (Góralnik) Shapiro with her husband, Asa, surrounded by family. — Sara Shapiro (seated from second right) surrounded by her family

USC Shoah Foundation Family Album

If they did not leave Minsk in the late 1890s, they would have perished in the Shoah.

My grandmother, Mania Lichtenstein, walking in Berlin with my mother, Jeanie Bernstein, who was born in a DP camp, two years post liberation.

My Aunt, Vera Steinberger, and I returning on a family trip Mako, Hungary. The family was deported to Auschwitz in April 1944 where many of them, including my grandparents, were killed. My mother and several siblings survived the initial gassing and were then sent to slave labor camps making munitions in a Siemens factory. It was a very moving trip for all of us.

From Radom, Poland to Los Angeles, CA.

Leybisch & Rachel Burg & son, Zloczow, 1935, my husband's granduncle's family, last correspondence returned during WWII marked in German "Addressee Unknown"--never heard from again!

My Children’s Passport 1939.

Here is a 1944 photo of my late-husband taken in southern France (L) Eli Cohn, born in Montpelier, France in 1941 with his brother Harry Cohn, born in Nice, France in 1943.

This photo below was taken in Stará Ľubovňa, Czechoslovakia in late 1930 (maybe 1937 – 1939). The woman was my grandmother, Dora Rosenbaum, who was murdered in either Sobibor or Belzec. The shorter boy was my dad, David Rosenbaum, who was a prisoner in Madjenek for four weeks and then Auschwitz for 2 1/2 years until liberation. The older boy was my dad’s older brother whose name was Tuli Rosenbaum, and he was deported to Auschwitz in April 1942 with only men over the age of 16. He was murdered in Auschwitz after being a prisoner for a few months.

Faye and Harry Toporek, Auschwitz survivors from Lask, Poland, before coming to America.

This is my mother, Julia Hirsch Fodor, and her daughter, Zsuzsanna, at her birth in January 1944 in Budapest, Hungary. Zsuzsa died on April 10, 1944 because she became ill and no hospital would treat a Jewish baby. My mother's testimony is in the Shoah Foundation Archives.

Morris Friebaum (Moniek Frajbaum) – circled in red – at 19 years-old, aboard the SS Marine Marlin, Sept. 1946, along with other young Holocaust survivors emigrating from Germany to the U.S., to begin his post-Holocaust life in heartbreaking circumstances identical to those he experienced throughout WWII: completely on his own, without family, friends, an education, money, possessions, keepsakes, heirlooms, or a single photograph.

A "small" portion of the over 218 direct descendants of Abraham and Sara Feit, who survived the Holocaust with their nine children: Hanna, Wolf, Isidore, Dora, Miriam, Joseph, Israel, Dov, and Eli.

My namesake Sidonie Cypra Gad who perished in Auschwitz January 1993 Convoi XV11 Deported from Malines/Mechelen Belgium Holding Camp which is now the Musee Juifs Belge Deporte. Sidonie was born in 1926. Here she is with her brother, Clemond, who passed away in 2014, Brussels, Belgium where I was born and spent my first 4 years. My parents were both Holocaust survivors.

This photo shows my mother and father and their siblings in their classroom in Lithuania. My parents are both in the picture, as they were next door neighbors since childhood. They met again after the war, and were the sole survivors of their town in Lithuania.

Zsuzsanna Lausch (my mother) with her sister, Julianna (seated), wearing Yellow Stars, and a friend in 1944 Budapest; they both survived the war in hiding, and immigrated to the United States after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Hannah Dajes (Zaidman), and her daughter, Rosa Shoichet, from Romania survived the Transnistria camp, and immigrated to Peru, with Udel Dajes (Hannah's younger sister, not in the picture). Hannah center right, Rosa center left. Family celebration of Hanna's great granddaughter’s Bat Mitzvah in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, March 1999.

The Lederman family before the camps. My mother, Zofia, is seated on her father’s (Avrum) lap. She and her mother, Chana, survived 5 concentration camps, sewing Nazi uniforms; Leon, her brother, survived the camps with their father, who was a tailor; Genia (on Chana’s lap) died of dysentery in the ghetto, and Frania (seated on the chair) survived hiding with a Catholic family. All were reunited in Sweden after liberation.

PFC John C. Kanzler, Member of the 14th Armored Division, the "Liberators." We were not allowed to watch Hogan's Hero's growing up. My father thought it trivialized the victims of the camps: both concentration and POW.

Ruth Ellen Glücksmann (center) in Margate, England in 1939, pictured with her foster mother, unknown woman and other foster children, shortly after arriving in England via the Kindertransport in May of 1939 from the Heim Isenberg home in Neu Isenberg, near Frankfurt Am Mein, for unmarried Jewish women and their children.

This photo was taken some time in 1946, showing my dad (Leon Klott) and me in Heidenheim, Germany, survivors of the Holocaust (I was born just prior to the end of the war in Europe). My dad and mom escaped from a forced labor camp in September 1944, and mom was pregnant with me at the time.

We are blessed to be four generations.

Steven Salen, NYC (Zoltan Salomon, Czeckoslovakia) at 101 years old. “Every day I’m alive is a miracle. I can’t believe I’m still here.”

Four generations in one photo: my grandmother, her mother holding me, and her daughter, my mother, where I get my ginger hair from.

Jakob and Cyla Spiewak with Krysha starting life again after losing both their entire families Bergen Belsen DP Camp 1946.

My mother's family getting out of Bergen-Belsen!

This is my mother’s (Genya Kozak) family from Mlynov, Poland in 1930s.

The last picture of my mother’s family, the Goldners, before they were all taken away. Only five of the adults survived.

My maternal grandparents, Samuel and Libbe Fussteig, of Vienna Austria who were sent to Auschwitz on the last transport from Theresienstadt in 1944; my mother, Selma Fusstieg Neuhauser, who was 11 years old was smuggled to Sweden where she lived until age 22.

Survivor.

Originally from Ukraine, we’re proud American citizens for over 25 years living in California from the time of our arrival as refugees in 1988.

This is the fake ID my grandmother used while she was living in Budapest posing as a gentile during WWII. Her real name was Magda Schwartz (later Fudem), and her fake name was Illes Gyorgyi. She had a very complex, long story; in short, she fled Slovakia, arrived in Hungary during the German occupation until the Russians arrived.

This picture was taken in 2015 in Jerusalem, on my mom’s 85th birthday. Chaya Newmann with her husband, Mordechay, surrounded by all their kids, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Both were Holocaust survivors from a Hungary, and met on their way to Israel. “משואה לתקומה”.

My mom, Sonia Symson, and me (Morrie) after immigrating to the United States with my father, Alter, in 1951. My mom, an Auschwitz survivor, and my dad, a partisan, met at a DP camp! They were the only survivors of their families. My dad passed away in 1963. My mother is listed in the Shoah Foundation Archives as Sonia Berson.

Marsha Leikach Tishler at the home in Poland of the Ukrainian couple who kept her safe for 2 1/2 years.

A family united before being broken apart – Reuben Feiger & Family.

This is me, Jackie Young, at a place called Bulldogs Bank in Sussex, England; I was born in Vienna, Austria December 18, 1941. At 9 months old I was put into Terezin – my name then was Jona Spiegel – and I lost my entire family.

This was the last photo of the Santocki family of Kovno/Kaunas, Lithuania, circa 1940 (pre-Soviet occupation); only 2 survived.

Dr. Andre Gratia and Assistant Sarah Dath. I was named after Celine Gratia, my great grandmother. [Pre-existing caption on photo:] Gratia/Dath Penicillin Discovery: 1946 Alexander Fleming: I cannot refrain from mentioning one other Belgian bacteriologist, my good friend Andre Gratia, and I mention for the special reason that, but for circumstances, he might well have been the discoverer of penicillin.

This is my father, Ernie Weiss, in a DP camp in Germany in 1946 wearing the U.S. Army uniform that a soldier gave him (18 years old).

Finally, on the train, on the way to Freedom, to the U.S., my mother, stepfather, and me.

Storytelling

My Name Is Sara

“You can’t just close your eyes and pretend that the history goes away,” says Mickey Shapiro the eldest son of two Holocaust survivors who just finished a four-year-long journey to create a film about his mother’s story. “I am stuck with this for life, but I think it makes me more motivated. When you hear a story like that from your parents, you want to make things better.”

My Name Is Sara

Join Us By Contributing Your Family Story

Add your family photo to our USC Shoah Foundation Family Album

USC Shoah Foundation Family Album

Sara In Her Own Words

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