Holocaust survivor Fela Warschau was almost chosen for Dr. Josef Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz. She survived, and would live out her life in Sheboygan.

SHEBOYGAN - Fela Warschau said the last time her family was together was in 1943 when they arrived at Auschwitz.

The family was removed from the Jewish Ghetto in her hometown of Ozorków, Poland. By the end of World War II, Warschau, who was a teen when the Nazi soldiers marched into town, would lose her grandparents, her parents and her two younger brothers to the Nazi Jew extermination program.

Fela (Jakubowicz) Warschau and her sister Helen would be the only immediate family members to survive the horrors of the war at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In 1945, British forces liberated the sisters and others from the same camp in which Anne Frank would perish. Anne Frank was a German-born Jewish girl who kept a diary in which she documented life in hiding under Nazi persecution.

It was only because her father was a watchmaker that the family was able to stay together. The invading Germans found her father was useful because he could repair watches.

According to a Sheboygan Press clipping provided by Katie Reily of the Sheboygan County Historical Research Center, Warschau's experience started after 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland. When she was 14 years old, she described being stripped, having her head shaven and being shoved into a cattle car bound for Auschwitz.

Shortly after her arrival to Auschwitz, Warschau, along with hundreds of other "human cargo," were dumped off the cattle cars. Three people were found to be dead in the car her family was in. Her family soon became a focus of attention of Josef Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death" at the camp. At the time, her mother was 39 and her father was 40, but because of the oppression by the Nazis, they looked far older than their years would suggest, according to Warschau's recollections in a Press clipping.

According to a Press story by reporter Dawn Belleau, who quoted Warschau about their arrival at the camp, "Mengele came in a little while and, as the line moved, he grabbed my mother from between Helen (her sister) and me, pushing her to the other side. 'No, she's our mother. Please,' Helen said. Then, he came to me and began feeling my shoulders. I was so scrawny, so thin. 'How old are you?' he wanted to know. My sister answered, 'She's 18.' Why did she lie? Because she hoped I would not be considered a child, but a worker — so we could stay together."

But Josef Mengele decided.

With Mengele pointing with a cane, he made his selections.

Her mother was killed, perhaps immediately.

Her father, 40, and her two brothers, ages 13 and 8, according to later accounts, were gassed soon after.

At the time, none of them knew the fate of others.

Somehow, the two sisters, Fela and Helen, escaped death and were sent to work in Hamburg, Germany, where work crews of Jewish women cleared the rubble following the frequent and intense Allied bombings.

War years completely robbed Warschau of her teen years, she said.

In 1995, having spent the last decade going to schools to tell the younger generation of what she experienced during World War II, she went to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she would record several hours of oral history in a video about her concentration camp experiences.

She recalled in the oral history video bad dreams she has had through the years.

"The time when I lost my parents, the time of liberation, that all comes back to me, and sometimes I have nightmares after this," she said. "I wake up, my heart beating, the Nazis are chasing me, I'm trying to hide, and every hiding place, they find. One time I was running so fast I was out of breath and I thank God that I woke up. I could hardly catch my breath while I was waking up. I could remember everything so vividly. So it's hard. I think the Holocaust will walk with the survivors til the day we die. It's a part of us, you know. It will always be with me. It'll never leave me; I don't think so."

Retired reporter Dawn Belleau noted when she interviewed Fela Warschau in 1985 she held a calm, determined exterior while recalling her story to the Press.

Belleau said Fela was determined to make sure no one would ever forget the Holocaust.

The Press story was a report on Warschau going around to schools to tell her story of her concentration camp experience.

It was at an American Zone interment camp in Germany following her liberation in 1945 where she met her husband, Anschel Warschau, also a Holocaust survivor. Her husband was the only survivor of a family of seven children. The couple's arrival in Sheboygan would be sponsored by Jewish families here. Originally, they were to have gone to Trenton, New Jersey, but because Helen was their only living close relative, Sheboygan agreed to sponsor them, too.

The couple arrived in Sheboygan with their daughter, Martha, in 1951. The couple would give birth to another daughter, Sally, after their arrival in the United States.

The couple would live out their lives in Sheboygan, working at Plenco and Hayssens for many years. Fela would die at 79 in 2006 and her husband, Anschel, would die at 93 in 2013. Fela is among seven Holocaust survivors whose personal archives are now housed at Mead Library.

When asked what she wanted people to remember from her experience, she replied somberly: "Please beware of too-easy schemes. Beware of someone promising you an easy life. Please think that it might come at someone else's pain and misery. Don't get caught up in a current of evil. Try to make the right decisions — not just about your life, but your fellow man."

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This article originally appeared on Sheboygan Press: Sheboygan Holocaust survivor Fela Warschau survived Mengele, Auschwitz