Irene Lipton, survivor of life-shattering events, dies at 87

Thursday, March 19, 2009 | by stacey palevsky

Holocaust survivor Irene Lipton died March 11 at age 87 at her daughter’s home in Albany, but her extraordinary story of determination and strength will live on.

In the early 1940s, Renia (as she was then known) was just 19 when she gave her infant daughter to a Catholic couple to protect the child from the Nazis.

“When the war is over I will come back for my baby,” she told the couple, Adam and Zosha. They agreed, and also changed the baby’s name from Blima to Eva so no one would suspect she was a Jew.

Renia and her family stayed in the ghetto in Czestochowa, Poland. Each day, Renia walked to a munitions labor camp where she worked; she arranged for Zosha to stroll the streets with the baby, and it was those glimpses of her daughter that sustained her.

But in 1945, after liberation, the Catholic couple refused to part with the baby, now nearly 3. Renia threatened to file legal papers to get custody, but Zosha and Adam disappeared with the baby.

Without her daughter and her husband (who was killed by the Nazis in 1943), she picked up the pieces of her broken life. She remarried and gave birth to a son, Leonard, in a displaced-persons camp in Germany. They moved to Israel and then to Ohio. After divorcing her second husband, she and her son moved to Northern California at the suggestion of her sister, who told Renia (now the Americanized Irene) that she knew an eligible Jewish bachelor.

That bachelor, Irv Lipton, owned the Cotati General Store near Petaluma; it catered to local chicken farmers, many of them Jewish. Irene and Irv married, had two children and ran the store together for a decade.

In 1957, Irene wrote a letter to the daughter she never knew. Eva, meanwhile, had no idea she was Jewish, nor that her parents weren’t her biological parents. She was shocked and curious when she received the note via an emissary.

Mother and daughter corresponded for more than a decade; Eva told no one. Final-ly, in 1971, they met in Bulgaria, where Eva Janik now lived with her husband and their two daughters.

“To see your mother for the first time as an adult, with your own child, it was a strong experience,” Eva said.

“The first time I saw her, I was wandering near my apartment, and I saw a beautiful lady get out of a taxi and walk toward me. And I just knew it,” Eva recalled. “If you ever wanted proof of genetics, we are perfect for it. I look like her. I moved like her. We both used to smoke, and we held cigarettes the same way. We sit the same way, lie in bed the same way.”

In 1979, Eva, her husband and their two daughters moved to Walnut Creek to be closer to Irene and her family, then in San Francisco and Albany. They opened a Polish restaurant.

Although her saga during and after the Holocaust required much strength, Lipton was so much more than that, said another daughter, Denise Resnikoff of Albany.

“She was headstrong, proud, fun-loving, an artistic soul who loved to disappear in books,” Resnikoff said. “She always had a sense of wonder about nature and science and the world around her.”

Lipton sewed and knit her own clothing. She also loved to argue about politics, adored music and was an ace poker and blackjack player.

“What I really learned from her is that you never give up,” Eva said. “You go on, one way or another. You go on.”

Lipton is survived by brother Henry Libicki; daughters Eva Janik, Denise Resnikoff and Connie Unger; son Leonard Tauman; 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Funeral services were held March 12 at Eternal Home Cemetery in Colma. Donations can be made to the Israel Association for Palliative Care (P.O. Box 324, 36046, Kiryat Tivon, Israel) or the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.