Lola Schuss

Lola Schuss, 96, a Holocaust survivor and longtime Jersey City resident, died June 30, 2018. She was born in Radom, Poland, and spent most of her youth in Krakow. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, her entire family was forced into the Krakow ghetto. In 1942, four months after the Nazis killed her parents and youngest sister Bella, she and her sister Edith were sent to the Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp.

Over the next three years Mrs. Schuss and her sister survived Plaszow and the Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Mauthausen concentration camps. During this period she helped her sister and her friends, in many cases at great risk to herself.

When she learned that one of the concentration camps was being evacuated and her sister told her she was too sick to leave, she and another prisoner held up Edith and another ill woman between them to mask their infirmity. After her sister was stricken with typhus at Mauthausen, she secreted food for her, and carried her sister to the barracks’ window to watch the Allies approaching. They were liberated by the American army on May 5, 1945.

After the war, she married Emanuel Schuss in Austria, where their daughter Frances was born. They immigrated to the United States in 1949 and lived in Jersey City, where their son Jack was born.

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She was a volunteer for the Jewish Family and Counseling Service of Jersey City and at Congregation Ahavas Achim in Jersey City. They moved to Brookline, Mass., in 1996.

At age 68, she received a bachelor of arts from Jersey City State College. She wrote stories and poems about her experiences from before and during the war.

Predeceased by her husband of 50 years in 1996, she is survived by her daughter, Frances (Ed Bloom); her son, Jack (Deborah); two granddaughters; and three great-grandsons.

Services were held July 1 with burial at Mount Hebron Cemetery, Queens. Memorial contributions may be made to Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1399 Roxbury Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90035; or Ben Porat Yosef, East 243 Frisch Ct., Paramus, N.J. 07652.