Survivor Profiles: Judy Lachman
I feel there is room enough for everybody. We should produce food instead of ammunition. Maybe we can learn to tolerate each other, to live with each other, to help each other. It’s about time.
Judy Lachman
Her Story:
Judy (nee Strykowska) Lachman was born in 1924 in Tomaszow Mazowiecki, a town in central Poland. When the war started, school was canceled. Akiva Zionist youth organization organized a clandestine school that Judy attended in a small, private group. Soon after, the Germans forced the Jews of Tomaszow Mazowiecki, including Judy, her parents, and her brother, into a ghetto. Judy and her friends at Akiva, which she had joined when she was 12, continued to operate the clandestine school and also cultivated a vegetable garden to feed sick members of the organization.
At 16 years old, Judy became a teacher of a group of 10 first-grade children, teaching them reading and writing. Despite the prevalent hunger and diseases, Judy’s parents hosted at their home community gatherings of singing and reading after curfew, an action punishable by death. In late 1940, Judy’s father, Joseph, was separated from the family. After two and a half years in the ghetto, in August 1942, Akiva organized Aryan papers for Judy. Upon her departure from the ghetto, Judy’s mother, Gitel, gifted her a celluloid tube with precious gems and commanded her: “Go. Maybe you will survive.” Her brother gave her a poison pill, hoping she would at least not suffer if she was caught. These items, and a few family pictures, were her sole remaining possessions in the world.
Outside the ghetto, Judy became a smuggler for the resistance. She reunited with her father at the neighboring ghetto of Piotrków. On the morning after Yom Kippur 1942, Piotrków ghetto was liquidated. Judy tried to help her father, but he was deported with the rest of her extended family. In the chaos of deportation, Judy lost her precious Aryan papers. After hiding for several months in the ghetto, she was eventually caught and sent to work as a slave laborer in an ammunition factory, where she stayed until late 1944.
As the Russians approached the factory, the workers were evacuated and sent to concentration camps in Germany. When they arrived in Buchenwald, a camp inmate warned her that her belongings would be taken away. She decided to hide the celluloid tube inside her body. She cut small squares to remove the faces of her family members from the pictures she still had, folded an Akiva group photo into small squares, and inserted them into the tube. Whenever there was a camp selection, she placed the tube inside of herself. She thus saved the only mementos she had of her friends and family. Judy was transported to several camps until she was finally liberated by American soldiers next to Türkheim, Germany, in late April 1945.
After liberation, Judy was reunited with her brother. She joined the Bricha organization, which organized illegal immigration to Palestine. However, she stayed in Sweden due to her brother’s illness, where she met her future husband, Earl “Al” Lachman. They moved to the U.S. and settled in Skokie in 1953. They had two sons and six grandchildren.
Following the neo-Nazi march in Skokie, Judy and Al became founding members of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois. They often spoke in public schools in the Chicago area about their experiences. Judy, along with Erna Gans, served as the President and Vice President of the foundation, and was germane for the founding of the first museum on Main Street. She was part of a group of founders who successfully advocated for the Illinois Mandate on Holocaust Education, the first of its kind in the nation, which passed in 1990.
Learn More:
USC Shoah Foundation Testimony
Members of the Akiva youth organization in the Tomaszow Mazowiecki ghetto, summer 1942. Only two people survived the war, Judy among them. Judy kept this picture safe throughout the war by hiding it in a celluloid tube her mother gave her. During camp selections she would insert the tube into her rectum.
Judy Lachman and her brother, Chaim Strykowski. Picture taken in a cornfield, 1938. This photograph was also kept in the celluloid-tube.
Judy’s mother, Gitel Strykowska. 1942. This photograph was also kept in the celluloid-tube.
Judy Lachman, 1938. In her oral testimony, Judy recalls keeping this picture “so that I know I didn’t come from the stones.” This photograph was also kept in the celluloid-tube.
Judy’s father, Joseph Stryskowski, in 1939. Perished in Treblinka.