Miriam ‘Margaret’ Shuman, Holocaust survivor, dies at 87

Before Miriam "Margaret" Grunstein Shuman and her family were deported from their home in Hungary during World War II, her father had a bracelet that she owned made into a ring that looked like a wedding band.

He thought the authorities would allow her to keep it, but they didn't, and she entrusted it to a neighbor for safekeeping.

When Mrs. Shuman died Friday at 87 in a Henrico County hospital, her ring and the engagement ring of her dead sister, which the neighbor also safeguarded, were the only mementos she had of home.

A blonde, blue-eyed native of Lechinta, Romania, which temporarily became part of Hungary during the war, she learned to sew when she was about 10. By the time she was 12, when the family moved to nearby Bistrita, she was working as a seamstress.

She surprised many customers when she began wearing the yellow Star of David required by Nazi authorities to identify Jews. "I looked like a German girl," she said, in a 1997 interview.

In the spring of 1944, a brother, who had been helping build a barracks nearby, came home to announce that the building wasn't for soldiers. "They're going to take us [away]," she recalled him saying in the 1997 videotaped interview for the California-based Shoah Foundation Institute's history archives.

From the barracks, they were loaded onto railroad boxcars for a 10-day odyssey through blacked-out Eastern Europe. When the door slid open at their destination, they found themselves at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. "My father said, 'There's our hell!'" Mrs. Shuman remembered.

Her younger brother, Uzher, younger sister, Edith, and her parents, Rafuel and Chaya, were waved to the right, while Mrs. Shuman, her elder sister, Channa, and another brother, Shmiel Yitzhak, went to the left. When her mother protested, she was told they would reunite later.

As they parted, "We looked at each other as long as we could. We were afraid to say anything," Mrs. Shuman recalled. As she later searched for them in the camp, a fellow prisoner pointed to the smoke of the crematorium and told her, "They are there," Mrs. Shuman recalled.

Through the next year, Mrs. Shuman and Channa spent time in camps in Riga, Latvia, and in Stolp, Stettin and Stutthof, Germany, which are now part of Poland.

Shortly after they were forced to view the hanging of seven Jews executed for stealing potatoes in one camp, Mrs. Shuman, who had kitchen duty peeling carrots, secreted several carrots in her sleeve to take to her sister, who was too ill to work.

"The guard said, 'Whoever has carrots, drop them, and nothing is going to happen. If we search you and find it [you will be killed.] . . . I had a sick sister and she was hungry. [I decided] I'm gonna hang on to them. It was a big thing to do," Mrs. Shuman said. She said she did it for "love of my sister."

As the Nazis drove camp inmates before them as they fled the encroaching Allies in the spring of 1945, the sisters left Danzig, Germany -- now Gdansk, Poland -- and were put aboard a tugboat that drifted for days, port to port, in the Baltic Sea. The German crew eventually abandoned the ship.

On the boat, Mrs. Shuman begged for some potato scraps for Channa, who was dying.

"She could not die for hunger," Mrs. Shuman said. "As hungry as I was, I swear I gave it all to her." Channa ate the scraps, drank some water and died in her sister's arms. The Germans threw her body overboard.

Mrs. Shuman said she was thankful that her sister was spared being shot by their captors. "I thank God that God took her life, and not the gun."

The group was liberated by the British on May 2, 1945, near Neustadt, in Germany's Holstein province. She spent time in a hospital, a British camp for displaced people and in the Jewish camp Feldafing in southern Bavaria, where she met her husband, Ruben Shuchmacher.

In 1949, the Shuchmachers immigrated to Richmond. In the process, their last name was changed to Shuman, and her first name to Margaret. Her husband, who retired from a grocery business, died in 1986.

Survivors include three daughters, Irene Edith Shuman, Anita Gordon and Shirley Truman, all of Richmond; and four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

A funeral was held Monday at Bliley Funeral Homes' Central Chapel and burial followed at Sir Moses Montifiore Cemetery in Richmond.