Doll belonging to a Polish Jewish girl

This doll belonged to Zofia Chorowicz Burowska (1923–2004), a Jewish girl from Kraków, Poland. Zofia received this doll from her uncle before the war when she was 4 years old. During World War II, the doll was left with non-Jewish friends, Romualda and Feliks Ciesielski and their family.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Zofia was 16 years old. To avoid being forced into the Kraków ghetto in the spring of 1942, Zofia and her mother moved to the village of Wolbrom. In September 1942, German authorities separated her from her mother, who was then killed. Zofia was sent to a forced-labor camp for Jews (Julag) just outside of Kraków. There, she worked in the camp kitchen peeling potatoes. About a year later, German authorities sent Zofia to forced labor in a munitions factory in Skarżysko-Kamienna. In August 1943, she was transferred to a Buchenwald subcamp in Leipzig. As the war was ending in April 1945, she and the other female prisoners were forced on a death march. She was liberated by the Soviet army. After the war, she returned to Kraków and retrieved her doll.