Sonia Reich – Prisoner of Her Past

Before the Second World War Sonia Reich, a girl of Jewish descent from Dubno, was called Bluma. She survived the Holocaust in Ukraine. She was 10 years old. She witnessed terrible scenes of murders and persecutions. One day a Nazi soldier placed a gun to her forehead and threatened to kill her. At that moment Sonia understood, that to survive she needed to escape the ghetto. She managed to survive from 1942 until the end of the war running and hiding. She occasionally spent the nights in houses of people who risked their lives, deciding to save Jews and give her temporary shelter. One of the people who hid her managed to get a false baptism certificate for her. Sonia learned to pray as a Catholic and to conceal her true identity- this is how she survived. Her whole family perished in the Holocaust.

After the war Sonia Reich emigrated to the United States, married, started working and raising her children. It seemed that after the traumatic events of the war her life finally became normal. In 2001 she was suddenly terrified again, she began to hallucinate and started running again. It turned out that 60 years after the Second World War she started suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD. This disorder is still rather unknown in Poland – it affects victims of wars, catastrophes, acts of violence and natural disasters.

During the meeting, the problem of the PTSD syndrome affecting Holocaust survivors will be presented by the psychotherapist and member of Prof. Maria Orwid’s team, Łukasz Biedka. In the premiere will take part Howard Reich and representatives of the Association of “Children of the Holocaust” in Poland.

The meeting is organized thanks to the support of the Embassy of the United States in Poland and the Michael Traison Fund for Poland.