Celia Weiskopf, Holocaust survivor who settled in Skokie, dies at 101

Celia Weiskopf, who survived the Holocaust and settled in Skokie with thousands of other Jewish survivors, died Jan. 16.

Mrs. Weiskopf, 101, died at a senior living facility in Northbrook from natural causes.

Mrs. Weiskopf, then known by her maiden name, Kadlubska, had just celebrated her fifteenth birthday when the Nazis invaded her home country of Poland and bombed her small town.

Mrs. Weiskopf and her family fled to the nearby city of Częstochowa to stay with relatives, but the home in which they took refuge soon became part of a Jewish ghetto that was cordoned and patrolled by Nazis.

She watched as the Nazis made their way through the ghetto, separating those who would be put to work to aid the Nazi war effort and those who would be sent to death camps.

Nazis regularly, and arbitrarily, shot people dead in the street, Mrs. Weiskopf said in a 2005 interview that was recorded and is archived with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

"Sometimes you'd see blood running in the gutter like water after rain," she said in the interview.

Her father, Aron Kadlubska, and two brothers, Dowid and Josef, were sent to the Treblinka death camp, where they were killed.

Her remaining family stayed together until she was about 18, when she was summoned to leave the home along with her grandmother, Fajgela, her mother, Miriam, her sister, Chana, and little brother Herschel.

They found themselves facing a line of German soldiers, recalled Mrs. Weiskopf.

"All of the sudden I felt a pull on my neck, they spread apart and closed up, and I was on the other side," she said in the interview.

This was the last time she saw her grandmother, mother and younger brother alive.

Mrs. Weiskopf and her sister, Chana, were put to work at a factory and survived the war.

Liberation came in January of 1945 after Mrs. Weiskopf began hearing the nearby explosions of Russian bombs.

"All of the sudden we heard screaming 'Come on out. The war is over. The Germans are gone. The Russians are here — Jewish boys with guns,'" she recalled in the interview, noting that Russian troops came through town with the bodies of dead German soldiers tied to their tanks.

After the war, Mrs. Weiskopf began working as a housekeeper for three Jewish brothers who were equally shattered by the deaths of most of their family members. The brothers survived by escaping the Jewish ghetto of Częstochowa and hiding in caves in the region.

She fell in love with and married one of the brothers, Saul Weiskopf, less than five months after the liberation.

With antisemitism still rife in Poland, the two decided it was time to leave. Mrs. Weiskopf had a great uncle in the Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago who was willing to take them in and hold a job for Saul at his downtown tailor shop.

After spending nearly three years in displaced persons camps in Germany, during which time Mrs. Weiskopf gave birth to their first born, a son named Fred, they headed to the United States in 1949.

The couple had another child, a daughter, Marion, and lived on the North Side. They later moved to Skokie and opened a tailor and dry cleaning business in Winnetka called Gage Cleaners.

Mrs. Weiskopf's husband, Saul, died in 1988 at the age of 63 from heart disease. Their son, Fred, died from cancer in 2021.

"She was the ultimate survivor, a harsh critic, a generous soul and a woman who had a strength that I’ve never seen in anyone else before," said her granddaughter, Stephanie Gladstein.

Asked during the 2005 interview what she would say if she had the opportunity to once again see family that was killed in the Holocaust, Mrs. Weiskopf said, "I don't know if I would talk, if I could talk, I would just like to hug everybody."

As of April 2025, about 220,800 Holocaust survivors, median age 87, were still living, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

Most survivors who are still living would have been children during WWII, pointed out Mrs. Weiskopf's daughter, Marion Gladstein.

"They mostly wouldn't have the memories or experiences. My mother literally survived by being a good worker," she said, noting that her mother operated a machine that recalibrated spent shells.

As she aged, Mrs. Weiskopf, along with the rest of her family, marveled at her longevity.

"She would say 'I had a hard life. What am I still doing here? I don't know," her daughter said with a laugh.

In addition to her daughter, Marion Gladstein, and granddaughter, Stephanie Gladstein, Mrs. Weiskopf is survived by two other grandchildren and five great grandchildren.

Services have been held.