Magda Brown, Auschwitz survivor who visited Pittsburgh after Tree of Life massacre, dies at 93

Magda (Perlstein) Brown, an Auschwitz survivor who spoke in Pittsburgh the day after 11 people were shot to death at the Tree of Life Synagogue, died Tuesday at her daughter’s home in Morton Grove, Ill. She was 93.

Brown, who was known to many as “Grandma Magda,” was a young witness to the worst horrors of the Holocaust. Her story of suffering and survival began on her 17th birthday — June 11, 1944 — when she and her family were rounded up in their hometown of Miskolc, Hungary.

Nazis forced them into a crowded cattle car that transported Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a concentration camp. They traveled for three days with little or no food, water or knowledge of where they were going.

Once they arrived, Brown was immediately separated from her parents and other members of her family who were sent directly to the gas chambers.

Deemed strong enough to work, she was assigned to a forced labor camp in Allendorf, Germany, a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1945, with the Allies closing in on the Nazis, Brown and others were sent on a death march to Buchenwald. But days later they were liberated by soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 6^th Armored Division.

The following year Brown’s aunts and uncles in Chicago sponsored her immigration to the U.S.

Brown’s poignant Pittsburgh visit

Brown was on her way to O’Hare Airport in Chicago to catch a flight to Pittsburgh on Oct. 27, 2018, when news broke that the worst attack on a Jewish community in U.S. history had just taken place at the Tree of Life Synagogue. Brown had previously been scheduled to speak at Chatham University the following day about her experiences at the hands of the Nazis.

When staff members at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, which had organized her visit, asked if she still wanted to come, her response was swift and determined. She was keeping her appointment.

“I was invited to tell my testimony, and then this killing happened that made my subject matter more important than ever,” said Brown.

Hitler hadn’t been able to stop her and the gunman, Robert Bowers, wasn’t going to either.

“In the midst of a very dark moment in our community, Magda was a ray of light,” said a statement from the Holocaust Center staff. “Her message of love and hope was of great comfort to many of us who were shaken by fear and uncertainty.”

Holocaust Center Director Lauren Bairnsfather said the event was moved from a smaller facility at Chatham to the chapel to allow for a larger audience; it ended up being filled to capacity.

“There was some push back from some people at Chatham who were truly afraid — and not without reason, because Tree of Life is across the street from Chatham,” said Bairnsfather. “There was a concern ‘is there going to be a copycat crime?’

“She was just the right person. She was so ready to respond to this time where nobody knew what to say, nobody knew how to respond. For us at the center and for me, there was a need to be active and to fight back and not to be silent and not to shrink away from what had just happened but to confront it.

“We had Magda as the voice of that moment.”

Brown, who lived in the predominantly Jewish village of Skokie, recalled in a 2018 interview with the Trib when Neo-Nazis attempted to march there in the 1970s. She wondered at that time if what happened in Europe in the years leading up to and during World War II could happen again, only this time in the U.S.

“I have the ultimate belief that there are more good people than bad people,” Brown said. “And that there are more people who will keep their eyes open and not follow the brainwashers who are spreading anti-Semitism.”