'Living is an honour': Bond between world's oldest Holocaust-surviving siblings forged in brutal time

They are believed to be the oldest living Holocaust survivor siblings anywhere in the world, and they live in Winnipeg.

Sisters Ruth Zimmer, 96, Anne Novak, 99, Sally Singer, 101, and their brother Sol Fink, 97, grew up in Sanok, in southeastern Poland, before the Second World War forever changed their family. 

Today the surviving siblings share an unbreakable bond — and a similarly strong desire to tell their story.

"Living is an honour. I'm not ashamed to tell everyone how old I am because it's good to live," Novak said during a recent interview at Shaftesbury Park Retirement Residence, which the sisters call home these days.

Life is something Novak treasures because it was taken from so many others, including their brother Eli, who was two years younger than Zimmer, and 80 other members of their extended family.

Days after the German invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, the five siblings fled to their grandparents' home in the nearby village of Tyrawa Wołoska, along with their parents, Shaindel and Zecharia Fink.

When that village fell under Russian control in 1940, Polish Jews who fled to Soviet territory were required to declare whether they wanted to become Soviet citizens or return to German-occupied Poland.

The Finks said they preferred to go back to Poland, according to the Shoah Foundation, a California non-profit dedicated to recording interviews with Holocaust survivors.

But instead of sending them back, Russian authorities arrested them — and other Jews who opted for repatriation — in the middle of the night, to send them to Siberia.

They were taken to a train station. As the family waited in a cattle car, Eli dashed out and ran back to his grandparents' house.

The rest of the family was put into forced labour in Siberia, where they received occasional letters from Eli. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, the Soviets set the workers in Siberia free and the Finks escaped to a village, where they lived in a cramped cottage and worked on a communal farm.

They lived there for the next few years, sharing one pair of boots between them and enduring hunger and terrible cold in their cottage, which also served as a makeshift synagogue for the village.

Meanwhile, the letters from Eli ceased.

When the war ended in 1945, the family walked 100 kilometres to a train station to return to Poland. There the siblings learned that Eli, their grandparents and other relatives had been deported to concentration camps and put to death.