Cyla Stundel - Oral History Interview, 1980
Cyla Tine Stundel with Daughter and Granddaughter, 1980
Portrait of three generations. Cyla Tine Stundel with her granddaughter and daughter, Golden Stundel Lerman. View the original source document: WHI 57248
Cyla Tine Stundel was a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust who settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after World War II.
In Sept. 1942, when she was 21 years old, the Germans invaded her home town of Maniewicze, Poland, and, within days, murdered all its Jewish residents. Cyla and a younger brother escaped death by fleeing into the forest the night before the executions. The rest of her family perished. In early 1945 her brother died of tuberculosis after two years in hiding. In December 1945, Cyla and her husband reached the Fernwald displaced persons camp near Munich, Germany.
In 1949, while Cyla was in her eighth month of pregnancy with their daughter, the family immigrated to Milwaukee. Her husband found work as a carpenter and Cyla became an active member in her neighborhood Jewish community. She continued to lead the life of an Orthodox Jew in a Polish shtetl in Milwaukee, speaking the Yiddish language and surrounding herself with friends of a similar background. Cyla eventually moved to San Francisco where she died in 2009.
Cyla Stundel, Oral History Interview
Listen to Cyla Stundel tell her story to a Wisconsin Historical Society interviewer.
Cyla's oral history transcript (PDF)
Read the transcript of the 1980 interview.
Learn More
Oral Histories: Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust
Hear the stories of 22 Holocaust Survivors and two American witnesses interviewed between 1974 and 1981.
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