Vera Korkus

Vera Korkus, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who settled in Sonoma County in the 1960s and freely shared her story with children and adults, died Saturday at her Santa Rosa home. She was 94.

A Sonoma County resident for 56 years, Korkus lived since 2013 at Friends House, a senior community in Santa Rosa.

Friends House residents on Saturday gathered, as is their custom, to "sing her away" as the funeral home vehicle departed with her body.

“From the time I came to the United States, the highlights of my life became brighter and brighter and my curiosity took me in many directions,” Korkus wrote in Who's Who, an album maintained by community members.

Under the listing of interests, she wrote “travel, theater, music and literature.”

Korkus was among an estimated 67,100 Holocaust survivors living in the United States in 2020, all at least 75 years old and nearly two-thirds of them women. Their numbers are waning, expected to shrink to 15,800 in 2030.

At Friends House, she became known as a gourmet cook and leader of classical music appreciation sessions, said Elizabeth Boardman, a resident and close friend.

Korkus shared her Holocaust history with students and Jewish congregations around the county and at Friends House, where she “didn't hold anything back,” Boardman said.

“She really felt like she was making a difference,” said Tess Abts of Cotati, a longtime friend.

Describing Korkus as “strong” and “very opinionated,” Abts said she also made friends easily. “She's really a remarkable person.”

Korkus, who resided in Sebastopol for about 20 years, was a partner in a former Christmas store in Montgomery Village, Abts said.

An Austrian Jew born in Vienna in 1928, Korkus was sent to a concentration camp at age 14 and persevered, as many of the adults and children around her perished from slave labor or the gas chambers.

“I felt strongly that I must survive, if for no other reason than spite. I am not going to let them kill me,” she said in a measured tone to a transfixed audience of about 60 Healdsburg Junior High students in 2010.

Her father, who fought in the Austrian army during World War I, died of lung cancer after three months at Theresienstadt, a collection point for Jews bound for Nazi killing centers in eastern Europe.

Transferred in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where about 1.1 million people were murdered, Korkus was sent to a barracks where women slept 12 to each wooden shelf and survived on meals of leek broth and bread. Her mother, among many prisoners deemed unfit for work, was sent directly to the gas chamber.

Korkus told the students how she escaped from a death march from Auschwitz, in Nazi-occupied Poland, to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany in early 1945 as Soviet forces were closing in on the Nazis. Those who couldn't walk were shot, while Korkus made a harrowing escape and eventually found her way back to Vienna, where she was reunited with her sister.

“It was amazing,” eighth-grader Jose Delgado said. “She just kept going, even though her family was dying.”

Korkus was not embittered by her childhood stained by tragedy and pain.

“It didn't sully her view of the world,” Abts said. “She was always kind and compassionate.”

In closing, she offered the Healdsburg students a bit of advice.

“If you feel sorry for yourself, you can't act, you are paralyzed. It's the worst thing you can do in your life.”

Korkus is survived by a niece, Beverly Saville, who lives on the East Coast.