On 7 June 1944, Zipporah Rieman, posing as Czeslawa Rymanska, celebrated her 21st birthday in Vienna, surrounded by Polish-Christian friends who were not aware of her Jewish identity. Zipporah survived. Her parents and brother were murdered in the Holocaust. Zipporah (Czesa) Rieman (later Sharon) was born in 1923 in the city of Korolówka in Eastern Poland. Zipporah trained as a teacher, and taught until the outbreak of the war. In 1939, the area she lived in came under Soviet control, and in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, and reached Korolówka.
Urged by her parents, Zipporah fled to Lwów in 1942 and located a Ukrainian acquaintance of her father's who took her in. Fearing for his safety, Zipporah searched for a way to leave Lwów. An advertisement seeking a housekeeper led her to the wife of the German governor of Lwów, who was looking for a housekeeper for her brother and his wife, who lived in Vienna and were expecting a baby. When the governor's wife asked Zipporah for her papers, Zipporah replied that she didn't have any. Claiming that her name was Czeslawa Rymanska, she explained that she'd left her papers behind in Korolówka. The governor's wife took her to the employment office in Lwów, registered her and obtained a work permit for her under her assumed name.
Zipporah reached Vienna, started her new job, and joined a group of Christian Poles who had come to the city to work, and whom she met at the church she used to go to every Sunday in accordance with her assumed identity. In June 1943, Zipporah received a letter from an acquaintance in Poland, wishing her a happy birthday. He wrote that her parents couldn't send their birthday greetings, as they were located in a "dark place". From this message, Zipporah deduced that her father Max-Majer, her mother Rozia, and her brother Munio-Mordekhai had been murdered. Later on, she discovered that they had been executed in June 1943, at the Jewish cemetery in Borszczów, 12 km from their home, together with all the Jews living in the surrounding towns.
She celebrated her 21st birthday with her Polish friends. They prepared an illustrated card for her: "Beloved Czesi, on the occasion of your 21st birthday, from your friends and colleagues," they wrote her. "From the darkness of misfortune to the bright, shining memories always kept from happy times in the homeland".
On 4 December 1944, Zipporah was arrested by the Gestapo on suspicion of affiliation with a Polish resistance group, and was imprisoned in Vienna. During her interrogation at Gestapo headquarters, she was brutally beaten. "He beat me to a pulp with a rubber bat," relates Zipporah, "and afterwards he didn't interrogate me anymore because I couldn't talk. I reached the prison. I couldn't walk or stand. I couldn’t lie down. I lay on my stomach. They kept me in solitary confinement. I had open wounds on my back and backside…. After about three days, they brought me a doctor who was himself a prisoner, and who was very kind to me."
From there, she was transferred to the Oberlanzendorf labor camp near Vienna for "reeducation", and succeeded in escaping a few days before the liberation of Vienna on 12 April 1945 by the Red Army.
After liberation, Zipporah reached a DP camp in Italy, where she taught until she immigrated to Israel in 1948.
