Pernal, Eugenia

Eugenia Pernal was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, to a successful businessman. She finished the fourth year of high school in 1939, when the war broke out. She went to the medical school in the ghetto for about three or four months before she went to the nursing school on Leszno. She finished her nursing courses within a year and received a diploma in nursing. In the meantime, she worked in Berson and Baumann Children’s Hospital on Sliska. During the massive deportations starting in July 1942, she managed to get out of the ghetto using fake Aryan papers and went to Germany as a Polish girl, where she worked for the French prisoners-of-war in a factory. She married Zygmunt Pernal after the war and settled down in Canada. She died on November 1, 2009 at Toronto Western Hospital.