Lala Fishman (1922–2011)

Lala Fishman, née Clara Weintraub, was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Lvov, Poland. She was a teenager hoping to go to art school when Nazi Germany invaded her country. Lala urged her family to resist going into the Jewish ghetto established by the Nazis. But eventually she had to flee Lvov with her mother and nine-year-old sister after her father and uncles were taken away and her elderly grandmother was grabbed from their apartment in a surprise Nazi raid. Lala was able to use her blond hair and blue eyes to obtain false papers identifying her as a Catholic Polish girl.
She fled into the countryside and moved constantly for fear of being discovered. She survived the Holocaust, and at the end of World War II, met Morris Fishman, a rabbi from Albany, New York, who was working for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in a displaced persons camp. They married in 1947 and moved to the USA, settling in the Chicago area. After many years, she finally entered art and design school and developed a successful career as an interior designer. She also spoke publicly about her experiences in the Holocaust. Her book Lala's Story: A Memoir of the Holocaust, was published in 1997.