Marta Weiss was born on 8 October 1934 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, one of nine children. With the Nazi occupation of Hungary, Marta’s father sent her and her sister Eva to live in Nitra, Slovakia under false identities. However, they were discovered, deported to the Sered transit camp, and subsequently deported to Auschwitz on 3 November 1944.
Marta was just ten years old when she arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau; Eva and Marta were sent to Dr. Mengele’s experimental block. They were liberated from Auschwitz and were reunited with their family in June 1945. Only at the end of the war did the family find out that Marta’s younger sister Yehudit had been murdered in Auschwitz. The rest of her siblings and her parents survived the Holocaust. In 1948 Marta’s family left Slovakia and moved to Australia. She married Harold Wise in December 1957 and together they raised three daughters and in 1997 they moved to Israel. Over the years, Marta met with youth from all over the world to share with them what happened to her during the Holocaust. Marta passed away in May 2023 at the age of 88, after leaving an unforgettable legacy of hope and remembrance.
Watch her extraordinary story below: