Krystyna Chiger

In early childhood, Krystyna Chiger and her brother Pawel led a happy life in their beautiful, sunny apartment in Lvov, Poland, with their parents, Ignacy and Paulina Chiger. The city, present-day Lviv, Ukraine, was known as a cultural center. Krystyna was only seven years old when Nazi Germany invaded Lvov at the start of World War II. By December 1941, the Germans had forced the city's 150,000 Jews into a brutal ghetto. Later there were deportations to forced labor and death. Krystyna's family escaped the liquidation of the ghetto with six other Jews in May 1943 by hiding in the stench and darkness of the sewers below Lvov for 14 months. When heavy rain fell, the water nearly reached the ceiling of the sewer and her parents had to hold their children above the waterline so they could breathe. They were saved from death by Leopold Socha, a Polish Catholic sewer worker who brought them food, medicine, and supplies every day until the Russians liberated the city in July 1944. Afterwards, the family went to live in Krakow to escape the Russian Zone, and in 1957, they emigrated to Israel. She became a dentist and married Marian Keren, a construction engineer and fellow Holocaust survivor, with whom she had two children. In 1968, they emigrated to the USA. Her memoir (written with Daniel Paisner), The Girl in the Green Sweater, was published in 2008. It was later reissued under the title In Darkness to coincide with the 2011 Oscar-nominated film, In Darkness, directed by Agnieszka Holland, which told the story of her group's survival.