Hanna Gutman papers

Hanna Gutman (later Hannah Goodman Sukiennik, 1923-2001) was born to Rachela and Szymon Rydelnik in Zagórze, Poland where her father worked as a tailor. Upon graduating from high school, Gutman attended secretarial school and at the age of 16, obtained her first job as a secretary. She worked for one year before the outbreak of World War II and the German occupation of Poland, soon after which she lost her job because she was Jewish. Sometime around 1940, she was forced to move to the Będzin ghetto, and for two years she worked in a factory making pocket books and chromed bicycles. In 1943, during mass deportations of Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Gutman and some of her siblings hid in a bunker to evade capture by the Nazis. Eventually, she and one of her sisters were arrested and taken to Annaberg labor camp and later transferred to a women’s camp at Neuengamme, where she worked in a blacksmith shop. Gutman passed through five different concentration camps until December 1944, when she was forced on a death march. During the march, she and her sister escaped but were recaptured. They managed to escape a second time and hid in a forest until they parted ways. Hanna went to a Sommerfeld, Germany where she was taken for a German and hid with a family until the war ended. She returned home to find that her parents and two of her six siblings had perished in the concentration camps. Gutman stayed briefly there and obtained work as a secretary with the local police department until she heard her brothers were in Munich and she moved to be with them. In December 1946 Hanna married her first cousin Izak Gutman (later Isadore Goodman) in Munich and together, they had a child, Louisa. In 1949, the family immigrated to the United States, settling briefly St. Joseph, Missouri and then Kansas City. Once in the United States, Hanna worked as a sales representative and Izak opened a tailor shop. For the remainder of her adult life, she struggled with severe panic and anxiety, a direct result of her experiences during the Holocaust.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Valerie Gerstein

Funding Note: The cataloging of this collection has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

The Hanna Gutman papers were donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2011 by Hanna’s granddaughter, Valerie Gerstein.