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Pela Rosen Alpert and Richard Alpert at their Engagement Party, 1949

From left: Mr. and Mrs. Blum (relatives), Pela Rosen Alpert, Richard Alpert, at their engagement party in the house of Pela's sister. View the original source document: WHI 56317

Pela Alpert was a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust who settled in Green Bay, Wisconsin, after World War II.

Pela Rosen Alpert was born in Dobrzyn, Poland, on October 26, 1920. She was the youngest of seven children in a well-to-do mercantile family. In the mid 1930s, her sister and brother-in-law, Rose and Jacob Fogel, left Poland to settle in Green Bay, Wisconsin. With the outbreak of World War II, Pela fled with her family to Warsaw when she was 19. She contracted typhus while in the Warsaw Ghetto and nearly died.

After her recuperation, her father convinced her to escape from the Ghetto by crawling through a hole in a wall. She never saw her family again. Pela was eventually rounded up for forced labor at the munitions factory at Skarzysko-Kamienna. After more than two years of grueling work, she was transferred first to a labor camp at Czestochowa and then to the concentration camp at Ravensbruck, Germany. She remained at Ravensbruck until late April 1945, when the camp's inmates were rescued by the Swedish Red Cross and transported to Sweden, where she remained for four years.

In February 1949, Pela arrived in Green Bay to live with her sister and brother-in-law. Within months, she was engaged to Richard Alpert, whom she met on a blind date. They were married on February 19, 1950, exactly one year after her arrival in Green Bay. After raising two daughters, Pela worked part-time at a pharmacy. Her husband, a former grocery store owner, was a salesman for a paper company. Pela died in 2005.

Pela Halpert, Oral History Interview

Pela's Testimony

Listen to Pela Alpert tell her story to the Wisconsin Historical Society interviewer. 

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Oral Histories: Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust

Hear the stories of 22 Holocaust Survivors and two American witnesses interviewed between 1974 and 1981.