Overview

A young girl is suddenly all alone and on the run from the Nazis in her hometown in Poland. Having survived an aktion that was intended to completely rid Czestochowa of all the Jews, she and her father try to make their way back to their home during the late hours of the night. Confronted by a policeman, Halina Goldberg unexplainably runs away from her father and begins her long journey of survival. When tired of fleeing, she volunteers to go into a work camp. That decision buys her some time because the Germans need labor for the war effort. Halina works in three different camps from the Fall of 1943 to January 1945. At first, the camps are bearable, even though the prisoners are worked hard and fed very little. But as the Germans begin to lose the war, the conditions turn deathly. The Jews become overrun with disease and their captors grow crueler and crueler. As it becomes clear that the war is lost, the SS empty the camps and set over 2,000 women on a four-month long march that would cover over 800 kilometers during one of Europe's coldest winters on record. Halina was one of the only 300 who survived the Volary Death March and finally felt the need to record her hellish story of survival.

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Halina Goldberg Kleiner was born in Czestochowa, Poland, in 1929. Her father owned a lumberyard in the city until the Nazis seized it from him after invading Poland in 1939. That began her terrifying story of survival. She was one of the few who survived the infamous Volary Death March. Halina met her husband-to-be, Leon Kleiner, after the war in a Displaced Persons Camp in Salzburg, Austria. They spent most of the next year together getting to know one another and hoping that someday they could marry. Halina was one of the very first Jews to be allowed to immigrate to the United States, and in the summer of 1946, she settled in Buffalo, New York. There she astounded her teachers by completing high school in only two years even though she could not speak a word of English when she arrived. She and Leon reunited in the United States in 1948 after Leon got his chance to immigrate to New York. They married in October of 1949 and started their very successful life together. They had three children who gave them five grandchildren. And now they have two great grandchildren. Sadly, Halina died on April 9, 2022, shortly before her story could be published. She was ninety-three years old. If you've watched TV at all in the past ten years, you've definitely seen her face and heard her voice countless times in any number of wildly successful national, global, and Super Bowl commercials, as well as playing the first blond Vulcan in Star Trek history. The daughter of two English professors, Natasha Soudek was raised in the South, speaks native German, lived in Berlin and Vienna, and finally settled in the Lower East Side of New York City as a teenager. After honing her stage presence by studying acting and playing hundreds of sold-out live music shows (singing and playing bass), she moved to LA to record with Channel/DreamWorks and act on TV. Favored on KCRW, Chris Douridas compared her voice and songwriting to the Beatles' Let it Be in meaning and soulfulness . . . qualities that translate especially well into her career as an audiobook narrator. Her voice is as distinct and memorable as the range of characters she's played on-screen, which gives listeners an immediate familiarity to connect to, along with a warmth and intimacy that spans and uplifts any genre. Edwin Stepp has more than thirty years experience in media, marketing, and advertising. He was executive editor for the quarterly, Vision-Journal for a New World, for over fifteen years. He wrote dozens of articles about history, culture, environment, and current events for the publication.

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