Sol Stopnicki

Born:
Kraków, Poland
June 23, 1923

Sol Stopnicki grew up in Kraków, Poland where his family lived in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz. After the Nazi invasion of September 1939, Jewish property and enterprises were confiscated—including the Stopnicki family’s scrap metal business—and Jews were forced into slave labor. When the Kraków ghetto was liquidated in 1943, Sol and his family were sent to the Kraków-Płaszów forced labor camp. He was separated from his parents and sister and both his mother and father were sent to extermination camps. Stopnicki was transported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp outside Prague, Czechoslovakia. The camp was liberated on May 8, 1945 and Sol was reunited with his sister in the hospital where Sol was recuperating from typhus. Stopnicki lived in the Landsberg displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany before joining his sister Louise Joskowitz in Houston in 1950.  

Parents:
Jacob Stopnicki, d. Mauthausen, 1944
Pesla Bucheister Stopnicki, d. Auschwitz, 1944

Siblings:
Louise Joskowitz, survived