Juanita Carmi papers

Juanita Carmi was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1935, to Yechiel and Frymet (nee Lefkowitz) Chmielnicki, who had immigrated from Poland in 1928. In addition to Juanita, the Chmielnickis had two sons. In 1941, the family left Argentina for the United States, on the S.S. Uruguay, arriving on December 15. Juanita's parents divorced in 1948, and in 1951 her mother married Markus Kavior (born 1888), a Holocaust survivor who was originally from Łódź, Poland. Kavior's father had owned a textile factory in Łódź, and when Markus was deported to Auschwitz, one of the factors he attributed his survival to was that his background in running a textile factory led him to similar work as a forced laborer in the camp. After liberation from Auschwitz and the end of the war, Markus returned to Łódź and discovered that his wife and children had been killed, his family's factory nationalized, and his home occupied by someone else. Since he had a sister living in New York, he immigrated there. Juanita, after her family's immigration, grew up in New York, and became a schoolteacher in Greenburgh, NY. In 1984 she changed her last name to Carmi, as relatives of hers who lived in Israel had done, including her cousin, Aharon Carmi. After she retired, she returned to college and earned a master's degree in history in 1995 at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and during her coursework, one of her projects led her to a research project that provided the occasion to conduct oral histories with four Holocaust survivors from the Baltimore area.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Juanita Carmi

Gift of Juanita Carmi, 2016.