New Yorker Helena Weinstock Weinrauch, a Holocaust survivor known for taking up ballroom dancing in her late 80s, died at her home on the Upper West Side on Sunday. She was just one week shy of her 101st birthday.
The cause was likely congestive heart failure, her niece Judy Paskind said.
“She loved being made up and dressed up,” Paskind, a retired accountant, recalled. “And a lot of people [at the funeral] yesterday were saying how elegant she was, and she was! She always looked put together. Until she got sick in the last year, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen her without makeup.”
Weinrauch’s incredible story of survival — and how she discovered, at 88, the joy of ballroom dancing — was the subject of a 2015 documentary, “Fascination: Helena’s Story.”
Weinrauch was also known for wearing the same hand-knit blue sweater during the first Passover seder every year for more than 75 years. The sweater — with fluffy angora sleeves, a metallic blue bodice and a scalloped V-neck — had been made by Weinrauch’s friend Ann Rothman, who stayed alive during the Holocaust by knitting for the wives of Nazi officials while a prisoner in the Lodz Ghetto.
“She became known in the ghetto,” Weinrauch told the New York Jewish Week in 2022. “She was so good at knitting that she knitted coats for the wife of the German people and it became known that Ann can knit skirts, a blouse — anything you want, she can knit it.”
Weinrauch was born in Dusseldorf in 1924 to a family of German-speaking Jews. Her mother, Gisela, was a concert pianist; her father, Maximilian, was a Viennese engineer who owned oil wells. She had a sister, Erna, who was six years older.
The family soon moved to Drohobycz, Poland (today’s Ukraine) for her father’s work, and Weinrauch was 9 years old when the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933. In 1939, following a brief Nazi occupation and later, the Russians, the family’s house and oil wells were seized. Weinrauch’s parents and sister were forced into hiding under the Soviets, but due to her age, young Helena was able to attend school while also working part-time in an office.
At her job, Weinrauch was given a false identity by her boss, which allowed her to continue living somewhat in the open. A year later, the family was reunited, but only briefly: The Nazis returned and, as conditions worsened for Jews, Helena’s parents and sister were rounded up. She never saw any of them again.
Weinrauch’s identity was eventually discovered when she was reported to the Gestapo by a former classmate who recognized her. Weinrauch was deported to Plaszow and then Auschwitz, where she survived a 500-mile death march to Bergen-Belsen and was liberated by the British Army on April 15, 1945.
Helena recuperated in Sweden, where she met Rothman, also an Auschwitz survivor, in the hospital.
Immigration to New York
Two years later, Weinrauch immigrated to New York, where she learned English by listening to the radio and reading the dictionary. To make ends meet, she worked as a dental assistant, a receptionist, a baby nurse and, for 30 years, as a medical paper writer to a professor of cardiology and nephrology in Manhattan. In 1951, she married Joseph Weinrauch, who was employed in the fur business. Their daughter, Arlene, was born in 1953.
Arlene, whom Weinrauch called “a very bright, intelligent, gifted girl” in her book, died from breast cancer in the 1990s.
“I have to say, of all the horrific things that happened to me — losing my parents and sister, being interned in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, spending a year in a hospital and rehab facility — nothing can compare to losing a child,” Weinrauch told Lilith Magazine in 2016.
In 2006, after 55 years of marriage, Joe Weinrauch died.
“After my uncle died, she started a whole new life with the ballroom dancing and creating a whole new group of friends through that and people in her building,” Paskind said.
Weinrauch would dance at the Manhattan Ballroom Society on the Upper East Side, where dance leader Steve Dane called Weinrauch the group’s “dancing angel.” She became very close with her dance partner, Slavi Baylov, who is more than 50 years her junior and was at her bedside when she died.
“When I dance, I forget what happened to me and it makes me feel for a few minutes or hours that I am happy,” she told The New York Times in 2018.
Play based on Weinrauch’s unpublished memoir
In 2023, a one-woman play, “A Will to Live,” based on Weinrauch’s unpublished memoir, premiered at New York’s Chain Theater. “My story is not fiction,” Weinrauch wrote in a statement at the time. “Unfortunately, this is my true story.”
It was also later in life that Weinrauch became comfortable speaking publicly about her harrowing experiences during the Holocaust, which she began doing through the Meta and John Spiegler Holocaust Education Fund, an endowment for Holocaust education aimed at middle school children in Corning, New York, established by Judy Paskind’s parents. (Paskind’s mother was Joe Weinrauch’s sister.)
“The kids wrote her thank-you notes,” Paskind said. “She got notes like, ‘we’ll adopt you.’ She was very touched by that. She kept that in an album and looked at it often.”
Weinrauch was also a well-known Upper West Side fixture, recognized by the staff at Barney Greengrass and Zabar’s, where she was practically treated like a celebrity — something she loved, Paskind said.
“I would FaceTime with her every week,” Paskind said. “And this morning, I was getting dressed and thinking, ‘I’ve got to call Helen.’”
She added, “She was a larger-than-life person.”
