Rosalie Chris Lerman, 90, survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau

When Rosalie Chris Lerman returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2006 with family, everyone filed into a long, brick barracks and paused at a particular wooden shelf by a window.

That's where, Mrs. Lerman said, she slept with eight other girls when she was just 16, where she saw a chimney belch the blackest, most acrid smoke every day.

Mrs. Lerman learned something from that window, her daughter said, and it saved her spirit.

"Looking at that window, at the chimney, she somehow summoned up hope. She summoned hope from the tiny acts of kindness that she saw, even in a concentration camp, between the prisoners," Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer said Friday.

"She always believed compassion was the strongest weapon and the driver of everything good in civilization. She believed compassion would win and life would be restored."

Mrs. Lerman, 90, of Philadelphia, died Thursday, May 19, at home, surrounded by her children, their spouses, and grandchildren. She died of natural causes, said son David.

Mrs. Lerman and her two sisters survived the infamous death camp, and she immigrated to the United States, where she and her husband, Miles, became chicken farmers in Vineland, N.J., and eventually owned the largest Amoco fuels distributorship in South Jersey.

"We didn't speak English - but the chickens didn't, either," Mrs. Lerman once said, describing their arrival in the United States after World War II.

She was also a philanthropist and an avid lecturer, her primary interest being Holocaust remembrance and helping Israel become a thriving democracy. Her husband, who died in 2008, was the founder and chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the museum, said Miles Lerman was a strong personality who readily admitted that his wife was his "secret weapon."

"She was equally strong, but in different ways," Bloomfield said. "She had a remarkable combination of traits. She was warm and wise and compassionate, and had really keen people smarts. She made people feel special. She had a really unique capacity for empathy. You'd have to work really hard not to love Chris Lerman."

Mrs. Lerman was born Rosalie Laks in Starachowice, Poland, in 1926. Her well-off family was decimated by the Depression and forced into a series of ghettos after the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939.

Mrs. Lerman worked in a munitions factory as a forced laborer. One day in the factory, the Nazis came and took her mother to a concentration camp, and she never saw her again.

Mrs. Lerman and her two sisters were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. "Each one of them felt obligated to look out for the others," Lerman-Neubauer said.

Touring Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother was surreal, Lerman-Neubauer said. But Mrs. Lerman believed that good had triumphed, her daughter said, and she lived her life that way until the end.

Her insistence on living a glass-half-full life rubbed off on everyone who met her.

"Chris refused to give up her humanity in response to the inhuman treatment she saw around the world," said Rabbi Ira F. Stone of Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel in Center City.

In addition to her daughter and son, she is survived by five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

A funeral will be held at 11 a.m. Sunday, May 22, at Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel, 300 S. 18th St. Burial will be in Alliance Cemetery, Norma, N.J.

Shiva will be observed at the late residence from 6 to 8 p.m., from Sunday, May 22, to Thursday, May 26.

Donations may be made to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum at www.ushmm.org/support, or to Beth Israel Congregation, 1015 E. Park Ave., Vineland, N.J. 08360.

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