Biography from Mariem Wiener, written by her greatgranddaughter Judith Elam

Mariem Wiener was born 27 May 1876 in the village of Poloniczna, (pronounced Poloneechna), near Toporow, today known as Toporiv, Ukraine. Her parents were Sender and Chane Rosa Wiener. The Wieners were part of the very Orthodox Belz community. Mariem was an only child. Nothing is known about her father, but by the time Mariem was 13 years old, her mother had remarried and given birth to 10 more children.

Mariem was married to Abraham Marderfeld , and in 1903 gave birth to their daughter Frieda Wiener in Toporow. Sadly, just 3 weeks before the birth of their son in 1905, Abraham died of tuberculosis. He was just 21. The new baby was named Abraham in honor of his late father.

In June 1912, Mariem moved to Nuernberg with her two young children. It is not known why she moved there, but there was a large Belz community of Jews in Nuernberg. The family lived at Hochstrasse 37/0. Seven years later Mariem remarried to Jakob Mansbach, another Orthodox Jew who was a widower with eight children. The marriage was a bad one, with lots of shouting, and Jakob abandoned Mariem and her two children in the middle of the night and fled to Berlin, where he lived with one of his children. He died in 1931 and is buried in Berlin. At this time Mariem and her two children were living at Ziegelgasse 22/I.

By 1937 Mariem was living in a Judenhaus located at Frauentormauer 92/11.  Both her children were married by this time and had children. Frieda was living in Leipzig and Abraham in Munich. Mariem enjoyed seeing her grandchildren in the summer months, when they would visit her. In 1938, just two weeks before Kristallnacht, Abraham was visiting Mariem, when the order was given for the Polen Aktion, and both of them were removed from their beds in the middle of a cold night, and herded like cattle with 10,000 other Jews like into trucks, which then took them to Bentschen, just the other side of the Polish border, where they were dumped, beaten, frozen and starving. The local villagers helped these poor Jews and camps were then set up and supplies made available to them by the Warsaw Jewish community. It is now known when Mariem was released from Bentschen, but in August 1939 she was living with her mother, Chane Rosa Wiener in Lwow. Both were eventually deported to the Lwow ghetto and died there.

Abraham spent 8 long months at Bentschen, and was then released, made his way back to Munich, then back to Nuernberg, where he was arrested a second time and sent to Buchenwald. He survived 5 1/2 years at Buchenwald, and even survived the camp liberation, only to die of typhus 4 weeks later. He is buried in a mass grave at Weimar. His wife and 3 children were deported to the Piaski ghetto. Frieda was transported with her youngest daughter from Leipzig to the Riga ghetto, and died en route to the ghetto, Her little daughter had been separated from Frieda upon arrival and shot. Frieda's husband and two other daughters all fled to England and survived.