Born: Paula Piekarczyk
Antwerp, Belgium
August 5, 1912
Died: December 23, 2002
Paula Proler was born on August 5, 1912 in Antwerp, Belgium. When Germany invaded Belgium during World War I in 1914, Paula’s family fled by boat to England. Returning to Belgium after the war, they found her father’s store had been bombed and destroyed
When she was about 10 years old, Proler’s family moved to Brussels where her father was able to rebuild his business. She recalled “a very cozy life.” Paulas married Michel Meicler, a furniture manufacturer, in 1936. The couple had two sons, the youngest born only days before World War II began on September 1, 1939.
After the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940, Proler’s parents and brother fled to France surviving multiple arrests and managing to find safety in Switzerland. Prohibited from working, Paula and her husband struggled to feed their family. Proler remembered that the “bread was full of sawdust” and she had to buy flour on the black market. In December 1942, Paula’s husband, an immigrant from Bessarabia (today Moldova), was arrested by the Gestapo. He was ultimately sent to Auschwitz.
Proler secured places for her two sons in hiding before hiding herself. British troops liberated Belgium in September 1944. After the war Paula and her sons lived with her parents in Brussels. In 1955, she immigrated to Houston where she met and married Ben Proler. After her second husband’s death in 1970, Proler began volunteering for St. Luke’s Hospital as a translator. She died in 2002 at the age of 90.
Parents:
Maurica (Moritz) Piekarczyk, survived
Mother Zeigfinger Piekarczyk, survived
Siblings:
Harry (Henri), survived
Jacques, survived
Toby, d. 1914
Children:
Theo Meicler, survived
Marcel Meicler, survived