Anna Ostrowiak, 88, and Brenda Senders, 87, are more than just good friends. Both born in Poland, they each endured the horrors of the Holocaust and lived to bear witness. That’s what led them to helping other Holocaust survivors, by volunteering at Jewish Community Services. For 12 years, Anna and Brenda worked in JCS’ Holocaust Survivor Support Program, translating and filling out paperwork that allowed the survivors to receive services, pensions and reparations due to them.

 

Both have haunting pasts. Anna lived with her parents, brother and sister in Warsaw until the war broke out and the family was forced to live in a ghetto, where they had little food and disease was rampant. In 1942, Anna’s father was taken away and never seen again. The family was sent to a concentration camp in Czestochowa, Poland, where they labored in a munitions factory until 1945, when they were liberated.

 

In 1942, Hitler rounded up all the Jews living in Brenda’s hometown of Sarny, Poland, and put them in a ghetto. Her family of six lived in fear and starvation; Brenda and one of her sisters were the only members to survive. The sisters became separated and Brenda went into hiding at an uncle’s house, secretly serving as a resistance fighter until the war ended.

 

“When we started volunteering at JCS,” Brenda remembers, “every day there were people lined up waiting to see us – the ‘invisible people,’ called that because they were poor and had nothing.” In recognition of their selflessness and compassion, the Greater Miami Jewish Federation named Anna and Brenda as the 2012 Volunteers of the Year, a prestigious honor they richly deserve. But as these two strong women will tell you, it is an award that belongs not just to them but to all the people like them who suffered unspeakable tragedies and survived to tell their tales.