Alicia Appleman-Jurman
Alicia Appleman-Jurman (May 9, 1930 – April 4, 2017), also known as Alicia Ada Appleman, was a Polish–American memoirist, born in Rosulna, Poland (present-day Rosilna, Ukraine), who has written and spoken about her experiences of the Holocaust in her autobiography, Alicia: My Story. Early life The sole female and the second-youngest child of Sigmund and Frieda Jurman in a family of five children, Alicia Jurman was raised from the age of five in Buczacz. Her parents and four brothers (Moshe, Bunio, Herzl and Zachary) were all murdered during the Holocaust. She escaped the Germans by being thrown through the window of a train taking members of her community to an extermination camp, hiding in bunkers, living in fields, barns, and pretending to be Polish or Ukrainian. After losing her entire family at a young age, Alicia continued to have a strong will to survive. After Germany's defeat, she joined the underground group Bricha, helping smuggle Jews out of Poland to Austria, then on to the Palestine Mandate, which would become Israel. In early 1947 she sailed aboard the Theodor Herzl, which was stopped by the Britain's Royal Navy. The ship's crew and passengers were sent to Cyprus and interned for