Sonia Orbuch

Orbuch died on September 30, 2018. She received obituaries around the world, including from the United States, Asia, and Europe.

She spent the rest of life in public engagement, speaking about her experiences and in 2009, published her autobiography, Here, There Are No Sarahs: A Woman's Courageous Fight Against the Nazis and Her Bittersweet Fulfillment of the American Dream.

She recounted her experiences in her public talks and in 2009, published her autobiography Here, There Are No Sarahs: A Woman's Courageous Fight Against the Nazis and Her Bittersweet Fulfillment of the American Dream which was co-authored with Fred Rosenbaum.

By May 1945 and the end of the war, she was back in Luboml working in a post office. That same year, she married former Polish cavalry officer Isaak Orbuch, whom she met in Chelm just after the war. Only 50 of the original 8,000 mostly Jewish residents of her town survived. After moving to a refugee camp in Zeilsheim near Frankfurt, Germany, where she gave birth to her daughter, the family moved to New York in February 1949, where Orbuch gave birth to her son Paul. She subsequently moved to Northern California with her family.

In exchange for her uncle's knowledge of the area, Soviet partisans accepted them and renamed Sarah as Sonia to sound more Russian. They lived in a forest camp and joined the partisans in acts of sabotage and resistance; she was drafted into the Red Army in 1944. During one of the family's period of hiding, her mother died from typhus. She gave assistance to the wounded, despite having no previous medical training.

The Second World War broke out in 1939 when she was 14. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union and her hometown came under Soviet control. Two years later, Operation Barbarossa forced the Jews of Luboml into a Jewish ghetto. Eight thousand Jews were affected, resulting in a scramble to self-defend, escape or hide. Unable to join her brother's partisan group due to her gender, Sarah hid in the forest with her parents and uncle during the winter of 1942 to 1943, keeping on the move and remaining hungry, cold, and unclean with lice.

Sonia Shainwald Orbuch (born Sarah Shainwald, May 24, 1925 – September 30, 2018) was an American Holocaust educator. During the Second World War she was a Jewish resistance fighter in eastern Poland.

Sarah Shainwald was born on May 24, 1925 and grew up in Luboml, then part of Poland but now of Ukraine, a town about 200 miles (320 km) south of Warsaw, Poland, that had an overwhelmingly Jewish population.