“I know how it feels to be homeless and all alone”

She
was brought to a hospital in Lund, Sweden, where she spent time
recovering. Her only possessions were a striped dress and a pair of
wooden shoes. From there, she and others were quarantined in a
displaced persons camp. “They wouldn’t let us out in case we carried
illnesses,” she said. The survivors were kept behind a fence, and the
locals would come by and peer through the fence, as if they were “in a
zoo.”

Once she was able, she went to work in a hospital kitchen
in Sweden. “My boss hated me with a passion,” she said. “I wasn’t
surprised. I figured half the world hated me, half the world didn’t
care about me. I didn’t care.” She just needed the money. But one day,
when they demanded she work on her day off, her principles took over.
She had lost her freedom once; it was too precious to her to lose
again. “Freedom means having choices,” she said. Without freedom, “you
don’t have a life.”

She walked out and took a train to the
biggest city she could find, Borås, Sweden. “I had nothing, knew no
one, had no money,” she said. She walked the streets, with no idea
where to go, cried for a long time, and prayed—when out of nowhere, a
girl she had known from Auschwitz saw her and took her in.

Itka
eventually found work. She met and married another survivor of
Auschwitz, also the only survivor in his family, after knowing each
other just 18 days. “Every person who knew me then said you are crazy .
. . but I felt for me this was right. . . . I am a very simple woman,
but I am guided by my inner voice,” she said. Her decision was a good
one.

(Click Silver Star Itka Zygmuntowicz Photo Gallery to see pictures of her early life and relatives lost in the Holocaust.)