Another survivor’s story

After The Chronicle’s 2009 Guide to Jewish Life in Kansas City, which featured a profile of every local Holocaust survivor we could find, was published a couple of weeks ago, we learned of one more: Nina Gurin.

Gurin, 91, now lives at Village Shalom, but she was born in Lodz, Poland as Nacha Weinbaum. She was a grown woman of 21 when the Nazis took over and ghettoized the town’s Jewish residents.

Nacha/Nina was separated from her parents and three siblings — all of whom perished — during an ordeal that took her through several Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen. She was liberated by the British Army and met her future husband, a fellow survivor named Max Gurin, while in the Displaced Persons camp near Bergen-Belsen. Max and Nina’s son, Harry, was born there.

With the help of Jewish social-service agencies, the Gurins managed to get to Kansas City by 1949, where Nina went to work for Brand & Puritz, making ladies’ clothing. Hannah Gurin, now Hannah Selznick of Scottsdale, Ariz., was born here. Max Gurin died in 1996.

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