The younger daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants to Belgium, Sarah Weinroth (Oct. 6, 1929 - May 7, 2024) and her older sister, Taube, grew up as the center of their parents’ world living in an apartment above her father’s Brussels tailor shop.

Trouble began in the late 1930s as Adolf Hitler came to power in nearby Germany. Her mother’s adopted brother in Pittsburgh sent the family immigration papers in 1938 or 1939.

“And my mother said, ‘No. We are not going.’ And my father said, ‘Yes, we are going.’ And my mother said, “No. I am not starting over again and we are not going.’

“And we didn’t go,” Weinroth remembered in a 1996 oral history video with the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation.

At 5 a.m. May 10, 1940, “All of a sudden we hear so much noise, shooting, and I run to the window and I see black spots in the skies. You know when they shoot at the airplanes?... I ran into my parents room and I said, ‘What happened, Papa?’ and he said, ‘It looks like the war broke out.’” The Germans had invaded Belgium.

Fifteen minutes later, her father told her mother, “Dora, pack. We’re leaving.”

“My mother went in the dining room, sat down and cried. And she said, ‘Avraham, I have a chair here. I have a table. I have a bed. You [are] making a living … Where am I gonna run now? I am not going. I am not leaving everything.’”

The doorbell rang. It was a chauffeur with a car. Her sister’s best friend’s family was waiting by a ship in Antwerp. They had room for one more person and would take Taube if her parents agreed.

“And my mother said, ‘I am not giving away no children. Where I go, my children go.’ And my sister stayed,” Weinroth said, sighing.

Two or three days later, Weinroth’s mother changed her mind. By that time, Brussels was under German bombardment. The family had to lie in gutters to avoid explosions as they made their way to the train station. When they finally arrived, no trains were running, so they had to return home.

News from relatives in Poland began to trickle in, none of it good, “but nobody wanted to believe,” Weinroth said. One postcard arrived written all in Polish except in one corner, where a message in Hebrew read: “Save yourself. Run.” The Migdals didn’t know what to make of it.

Anti-Jewish laws were passed in Belgium. Jewish children were not allowed to attend schools; all Jews had to wear a star.

Sometime at the end of 1941 or beginning of 1942, Taube was captured in the street and the family never found out what happened to her.

Twice, Weinroth nearly experienced the same fate.

Once, disregarding her mother’s orders, she put on her coat with its prominent Jewish star and went to retrieve a dress she had left at a cousin’s. German soldiers began chasing her, yelling “Stop!” and shooting in the air. She ducked into a grocery and hid behind a cupboard. A woman found her and cut the star off her coat so she was able to return home. But she could hear boots on the sidewalk as the soldiers continued to search for her.

A few weeks later, she disregarded her mother’s orders to stay home and went to a friend’s apartment. While they were putting stamps in a stamp collection, German police came and forced everyone into the second floor hallway. Weinroth put her coat on the bannister, sat on the coat and slid quietly downstairs to the street, before running home.

“My father said, ‘This is it. We lost one. I’m not losing the other.’”

He went to the state house and said he wanted to send a child to an orphanage, code for sending a child into hiding.

She ended up at a Belgian orphanage living on food that she found inedible. Hungry, she disobeyed orders and wrote to her parents to ask for food.

About five days later, the director called her into his office. “He was livid. I had never seen him so mad. He said, ‘I got a package for you from your mother and father and how did they know where you are?’” And she had to confess.

The Gestapo came a couple of days later while the children were picking blueberries in the fields. When the children returned, the director gave them an hour to pack before they were moved to a convent about 18 miles outside of Brussels.

She and the 18 other Jewish children had to seem the same as the Catholic orphans already at the convent. That meant attending church services and catechism every day and crossing themselves before meals. For a child raised in an observant Jewish home, it was a difficult adjustment.

On the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur one year, the mother superior allowed one child to fast on behalf of the others. Having one child feigning illness and not eating would not draw attention; having 19 children not eating would.

On another occasion, a nun asked Weinroth why she didn’t take communion or go to confession. “But Sister Maria, I never sin,” Weinroth replied.

Most of the time, the children lived in fear. “It was a waiting game to see whether we [were] going to make it or not.”

After the war, her father found her somehow and took her home. “But at home [it] was very difficult. It was not the same mother and papa I had left. … They had lost everything … totally broken down. Sure, they loved me, they would have given their life for me – but they were not the same.”

One time, she turned on the radio. Her mother shut it off. ‘Your sister died in a concentration camp. What do you need the radio for?”

With subsidies from the city of Brussels, Weinroth was able to attend business classes and take up bookkeeping. “I went to school. I made it. I went to work. I helped out my parents.”

She met and married her husband, Ignace, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, and in 1955 with their small daughter, they eventually moved to Pittsburgh.

“Why in Pittsburgh?” Weinroth said on the video. “Because my mother had an adoptive brother there” — the same brother who had tried to bring the family to the U.S. in the late 1930s.

They had another child, Joseph, now a semiretired lawyer and former Pittsburgh mayoral candidate. With help from the mother superior of the convent in which Weinroth had hidden, her parents were able to join them within three years.

The Weinroths opened a dry-cleaning business, Eastmont Cleaners, first in Eastmont then in Monroeville, where her father worked as a tailor.

She could push away the past while she was working and raising children. In retirement, the memories came in her dreams. “It’s a ghost behind you. It’s a shadow. It does not go away. It can destroy you,” she said.

The experience “affected her, her entire life in terms of being a nervous person, being watchful over her children,” her son, Joseph, said by phone. “She was just very watchful and careful about everything.”

She died in New York, living with her daughter. “She was a fighter to the end,” Joseph Weinroth said.

Laura Malt Schneiderman, lschneiderman@post-gazette.com.

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