Rose Sherman Williams, a Holocaust survivor who moved to San Antonio and shared her life experiences and life lessons with generations of young people, died on Saturday, January 11. She was 97.
She was a beloved and dedicated volunteer with the Holocaust Memorial Museum of San Antonio (HMMSA), which shared the news of her death on Instagram.
She published her memoir in 2019. Letters to Rose: A Holocaust Memoir with Letters of Impact and Inspiration from the Next Generation was co-authored with Becky Hoag and Robin Philbrick.
HMMSA explained in a statement that she was born in Radom, Poland, on June 10, 1927. In 1939, when she was 12, the Nazis invaded her country and arrived in her hometown. She was sent to a labor camp, where she was beaten, starved and subjected to many other deplorable conditions.
The Sherman family, including Rose and three siblings, their parents and grandmother, lived in close quarters with no heat and no water. When the Nazis liquidated their community, Rose was separated from her family.
She shared details of her experiences in a 2017 interview on TPR’s "The Source:" “The time was already 6th of August 1942. By the time I was awakened, all my family—about 60 people—were all gone, plus my three siblings.” She added, “I was sent to an ammunition factory in Poland and continuously cried.”
In 1943, she was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she was designated "A15049," the serial number tattooed on her arm that was used to identify her in the concentration camp.
In her book, she recounted meeting Dr. Josef Mengele, who was known as the Angel of Death. She wrote that she also endured a death march and even worse conditions at the Bergen-Belsen camp.
As the war neared its end, British forces liberated Rose and the camp's other survivors. She was 17 years old and weighed only 87 pounds.
She found a job in Stuttgart, Germany. She later came to the United States and eventually settled in San Antonio to raise a family with her husband, Jack.
For decades, and into her 90s, she shared her story through her book and through speaking engagements and her volunteer work at the HMMSA.
She presented it as a story of her faith and her insistence on living life with hope. The message she passed on to generations—thousands of people who learned about her story—was consistently one of resiliency and forgiveness.
An obituary from Porter Loring Mortuary includes, in part, the following details:
Rose Sherman Williams was preceded in death by her parents Jacob and Pearl Sherman; sister Binne Sherman Harris; brothers Jurek and Motek; her beloved husband, Jack Williams; and son, Pete Serchay. Survivors include son A Jay Serchay (Mary); grandsons Alexys (Caryn), Jason, and Sammy; Dianne Evans, and numerous nieces and nephews in Georgia and Israel.
A graveside service was held in Agudas Achim Memorial Gardens on Tuesday, January 14, 2025.