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Cypora Zonszajn, (maiden name Jabłoń) born in 1915 in Siedlce.
Before the war Cypora had hopes that studying at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences would be the best investment in her future before the planned trip to Palestine. However, In October 1939, her hometown Siedlce fell into the hands of the German Nazis, which began a period of persecution of the civilian population. On Christmas Eve, the occupier set fire to the synagogue.
In 1941, Cypora together with her husband and parents were driven from the family home to the ghetto, where her daughter Rachel was born in October. In 1942, after another wave of persecution against Jews from the Ghetto, Cypora decided to give Rachel to her Christian colleague Ireta Zawadzka, only for the time being. In August of the same year, Cypora’s parents were deported to the Treblinka death camp. At the end of 1942, during yet another deportation operation, Cypora and her husband refused to obey the orders of the German occupier and took cyanide.
“It was Friday, August 22, 1942. The last few weeks were a terrible suspense. In Warsaw (600 thousand people) there is a displacement of Jew from Radom, Kielce and other places. There are constantly trains departing with people headed to the death camp in Treblinka. We are next, but we are still deluding ourselves, hoping to get around it…” she wrote in her memoir.